


Warped Away

by vanadis01



Category: Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: (mostly), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Biology, Dragons, F/M, Genetic Engineering, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Realistic Microbiology, Science, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Time Travel, microbiology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:40:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25282522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanadis01/pseuds/vanadis01
Summary: A dragon living in the luxury and comfort of the 21st century finds herself somewhere very strange…
Comments: 17
Kudos: 47





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The first story I've posted online. Enjoy!
> 
> (Comments and feedback appreciated!)

Wait… what the hell happened?  
Dazed, the four-stories withers-height dragon rose to her feet, taking in her surroundings in disbelief. Looking around, she saw… Grass? She was clearly no longer in the laboratory, that much was certain, but where had she ended up? In the middle of a field apparently, stretching on for miles and miles, with a bunch of small buildings in the distance.

She checked herself. Her hind leg felt a bit sore from falling, but it wasn’t broken, and considering her wings seemed fine she wouldn’t have to use it much either way. She bent her neck down towards her chestpack (to get her head close enough to open it with her telekinesis) but she realized it was missing, along with her cellular iPad and the rest of her things! She looked around, but it wasn’t to be found. So much for calling for assistance!

Her thoughts went back to the houses in the distance. They looked very old-fashioned and farm-like, but hopefully, there would be someone there with a phone she could borrow. From the look and shape of the buildings, she was probably somewhere in Europe or the USA, meaning there wouldn’t be any legal restrictions on flying.

She unfolded her massive yellow wings, and launched into the air with a gentle leap, heading towards the buildings. They were a few miles away, but thanks to her flight, the journey would only take minutes.

Her friend and colleague Johnson would never hear the end of this, she mused. The day his wacky science project sent her, a ginormous dragon, across the world, to a random field in the middle of nowhere. It might not have worked at all as intended, but it would still make one hell of a thesis!

With a chuckle, she decided to increase her altitude; she did not see any vehicles working in the field, but decided it was best to not risk bothering anyone by flying low.

She was nearing the buildings, clearly a tiny village now that she saw it better, and could make out people. Despite the rustic look, the place wasn’t abandoned!

There was a large, flat area right outside the village which she chose as a landing spot. She decided to descend slowly and carefully, making big circles around the village. There was no way of telling how accustomed to dragons these particular villagers were, so it was best to be careful. None seemed to have taken notice of her yet though, so she decided to call out “Hello!”.

One lady, in particular, seemed to look around for a moment, seemingly confused, before looking up, her eyes meeting her own.

“Hello down there! Sorry for intruding, but do you have a phone I might borro-”  
The lady’s face twisted in an expression of pure horror as she threw away the basket she was holding, pointed straight at her, and proceeded to let out a bloodcurdling scream. The village exploded in a flurry of chaos, the villagers dashed into the various huts as the dragon finalized her descent, only to be met by complete silence by the time she had landed.

“What? Wait! I’m not going to hurt you. I just need to borrow a phone!”

No response… Oh no. Now she risked getting into legal trouble for spooking the villagers!

The golden-yellow dragon sat still for a moment, pondering her options. There was a road she could try following, maybe it would lead somewhere with more helpful people. Maybe even a city, if she followed it far enough, where she would be guaranteed to not run into any scared farmers. Yes, this was the best option she decided. If this was Europe she was bound to happen upon a city in no time.

As she unfolded her wings in preparation for take-off, she heard a roar in the distance. Maybe help was coming to her?

She looked up and saw a dragon coming towards her, deciding to stand down from taking flight but continuing to unfold her wings, only so she could re-fold them again properly. It was not any breed she recognized; bulky, with large talons, blue with white stripes on the body and wings. Medium-sized, she realized as he drew closer, wearing a large and very strange safety harness. Were those humans on his back? She gawked at the strange dragon and his passengers as he came in for a landing on the same patch as her, some 20 meters from her.

On of the humans jumped off and came running towards her while waving his hands, screaming at the top of his lungs:

“Arrêtez! Arrêtez! Stop!”

French! So she must have ended up in France? She had studied some French, but that was three decades ago, back in secondary school. Calling her French rusty wasn’t really appropriate since that implied it had been passable at some point, but she had to try her best to communicate with the bewildered man.

Summing every last bit of her lackluster French-speaking ability, she thought out her response.

\- “Mais je suis deja… immobile! Qui es-tu, ehrr…, vous, et pourqoui parlez vous si fort?”  
(“But I’m already still! Who are you, and why are you speaking so loud?” or something along those lines, hopefully.)

\- “Vous parlez francais?”  
(You speak French?)

\- “Oui, mais seulement un peu”  
(Yes, but only a little.)  
\- “Are you… English?”

His English clearly wasn’t very good.

\- “What? No I’m Swedish, uh, je suis Suédoise… ?”

The man’s frown grew deeper.

\- “…je viens du Suède?”

He paused for a moment before responding, still shouting.

\- “Are you with the English?”

She wasn’t completely sure what he meant.

\- “No? Why is that even important? Listen, I’m lost, and I really need to make a phone call.”  
He clearly did not understand.

-“Je suis… Ehrr… disparaitre? Puis-je emprunter ton téléphone portable?”

Her french did not seem to impress the strangely dressed man, who suddenly decided to speak up again, ignoring her question.

\- “Ou are you? Ouere is your captain? Tell me now!”

“My name is Gunilla Martensson. I’m a genetic engineer from the Royal Institute of Science in Stockholm. Now, who are you people? And do you have to shout at me?”

She spoke slowly and clearly (this person was clearly as bad at English as she was at French!) and he seemed to understand, or at least some of it.

\- “I am Emile Dubois, capi-tain ouf dragon of the army of the air. You must tell me where is your captain!”

\- “Captain? Uh, sorry, I’m not quite sure what that is supposed to mean. Maybe you mean leader? Like, you and the others seem like a group of some kind, and maybe you’re the leader? In that case, I suppose I’m not really part of any flying group. I mean, I do have human friends, and we could maybe be considered a group, and as a matter of fact, the reason I’m here in the first place is that…”

\- “Tas-toi! Où Es. Ton. Capitaine?”

This man was very rude, refusing to stop his shouting, so she decided to shout back at him:

\- “Je n’ai pas un capitain! I don’t have one!”

The man frowned again, and barked back “Wait here!” before turning and promptly walking back to the other dragon. He and the others seemed to discuss something among themselves, some looking back at her occasionally. Gunilla couldn’t help but grow annoyed at these strange people, shouting at her, pretending to be part of some army (they were totally not!), demanding she would stay with them, and now even being so rude as to walk away from and ignore her. Well, she would not stay and wait for them, then! A few moments passed as she thought out a proper response to shout at these ruffians.

\- “Tu es vraiment très impoli! Je cherché seulement de l’assistance, mais tu cries à moi, et poses des questions ridicules! Je suis… fatiguée de toi! Adieu!”

As she readied herself to ditch this useless village, the gang went crazy with shouts and clamoring, and the supposed captain pulled something out of his waistband. A gun! Gunilla immediately froze as he pointed the weapon at her head. These people were crazy!

\- “Stop! Or I shoot!”

\- “Wait, don’t shoot! I’ll stop, I’m still! Je suis arrêtée!”

As she went stiff, the commotion seemed to quickly die down.

\- “What do you want from me? I lost my chestpack, I don’t have anything of value! Qu’est-ce que vous voulez de moi? Je n’ai pas rien!”

She looked over to the other humans, nine of them, many holding long objects that she now realized were probably rifles of some kind. The strangest day of her life was taking a turn for the even stranger, as she was apparently about to be robbed by a band of french bandits, including a dragon. How the hell did they manage to avoid being tracked down instantly by police radar?

She had never been held at gunpoint before, had never even considered it a possibility, but she had seen (human) movies depicting it. She decided to stay very still as the french seemed to discuss among themselves. Her hearing was good, but her french listening comprehension wasn’t, so she only managed to make out some words from her robbers.

The captain, encouraged by her reaction, approached her with two others, one holding a coil of rope, gun still raised, grinning.

\- “You will lay down, and be still. If you refuse, we shoot. Understand?”

\- “I… I understand. But… why the rope?”

As she laid down in a sphinx position, she stared at the coil of natural rope. They couldn’t possibly expect to tie her down with so little of it… Right?

The man, or rather, boy with the rope did not stop in front of her as expected, but instead threw the coil over his shoulder and began to… climb her? She could only stare in utter shock and surprise as she felt the human casually make his way up her left shoulder, apparently very experienced at this, grabbing her rougher and slightly protruding shoulder-scales with ease. Before long she felt the slight weight of the boy at the base of her neck, doing something, but she did not dare to swivel her head around to look, it wasn’t worth the risk, the twitchy lunatics still pointed their weapons at her. She decided to ask this supposed captain.

-“What is he doing?”

\- “He is making the harness. We have captured you, and you will fly with us.”  
What was happening? This wasn’t a robbery. They were trying  
to kidnap her! She felt her heart beat faster from the realization and the following adrenaline rush.

The boy was walking along her spine, occasionally tugging at her rougher scales there experimentally, and then shouted something in incomprehensible rapid-fire french. Something about being missing? The captain shouted something back, this time wholly incomprehensible, and the boy made his way forwards again, towards her neck and shoulders. He threw the rope down the side of her neck, where it was caught by the other, slightly older boy, who threw it up the other side. They were tying it around her neck, making several more coils before tying it fast, creating a makeshift safety harness, presumably for attaching their carabiners.

She didn’t know very much about kidnappings in general, she usually wasn’t into crime drama and such series, and she sure hadn’t heard anything about heavyweight dragons being kidnapped. But she had read something about the majority of (human) kidnapping victims who got away only survived because the escaped immediately. Getting into a kidnapper’s car or van was basically a guarantee to never be seen again. A death sentence, or worse, she thought with a silent shudder.

She knew that if the armed men were to get on her back and latching on with their carabiners, she would have no way of getting them off, at least not without getting shot in the neck in the process. Practically the same as being coaxed into a kidnapper’s van. Her eyes went wide from the realization. She couldn’t let that happen, she had to escape before then, but it was probably smartest to feign compliance for now. Her heart was racing in her chest, fight-or-flight response kicking in hard, but did her best to conceal it.

The captain spoke up again.

\- “I board now. You follow my command and do not ask questions. Understand?”

\- “...Yes”.

\- “Very good.”

The captain approached and began climbing her upper foreleg and shoulder, just like the boy had done, but he was not as quick.

When the captain was halfway up her shoulder, she decided to make her move. Suddenly rising to a sitting stance, the captain fell off immediately, and the boy, luckily not yet strapped in, came tumbling down her back after a few violent shakes of her shoulders. There was shouting and screaming as she opened her wings, preparing to take to the sky.

Adrenaline rushing, she launched herself up and away with her powerful hind legs, hardly flinching at the sudden crackle of gunfire. She felt stings of pain all over her body, but ignored it, she just wanted to get away from this insanity, panicked wing beats taking her higher and higher as for the first time, she had to flee for her life…


	2. Chapter 2

She flew like hell, ignoring the searing sensation in her flight glands as she decreased her weight faster than ever before, wings flapping frantically to get away from her assailants. Her jaw ached as if she’d hit it on something, but knew that was not it. They shot her!  


Finally light enough to ascend, she set off into a steep climb, hoping to get high enough to start gliding before the other dragon could catch up with her. She glanced back and just saw him launching into the air, spurring her on even more. She had a head start, but the smaller dragon was probably going to be faster in regular flight; she had to start gliding before they got close enough to shoot again. After a few minutes of panicked climbing, she could hear her pursuers closing in behind her. She was only about three hundred meters in the air at this point, but it would have had to do.

  
Leveling out, she spread out her wings to their full size and rapidly increased her weight. She could not flap her wings very well when they were fully extended like this; they simply were too large, but she would not need to. She felt the increased pressure against her wing membranes as gravity pulled her down, and was promptly accelerated forwards, her glide-optimized wings ensuring every meter lost in altitude was gained several times over in horizontal velocity.

The other dragon did not have wings large enough to glide like this, so this would be her way of out-flying him. But she did not dare to look back and decrease her glide efficiency in the process; if she was too slow she would know soon anyway. She quickly reached her optimal gliding speed of about sixty knots and decided to level out. Going any steeper and faster would not be optimal; she was not very high and needed to get as much distance as possible out of her altitude before she had to slowly climb again.

  
The headwind was too loud to hear anything, so some minutes later she decided to take a look. To her relief, the murderous dragon was pretty far back, at least two kilometers, and he only seemed to get further and further away. Just as she suspected, he did not seem to be able to glide very fast, so she should be able to escape them! But the ground below was getting very close, and soon she would have to slowly climb to a higher altitude again. She decided to continue gliding for as long as she could though, to get as much time to climb as possible, and only began decreasing her weight once she was a few dozen meters above the fields below.

  
She retracted her wing-sails and began climbing again. She took it slower this time, making sure not to strain her flight glands in the process, and she made her wingbeats slow and steady; there was no telling how far from safety she was, or how long the striped maniac would continue chasing her, so not tiring herself out was definitely important. She looked back occasionally, and sure enough, the blue dragon was slowly gaining on her. At least he was pretty far away, so she would be able to get much higher before she had to glide again this time.

  
By the time the blue dragon was close enough for her to make out the humans on him, she was probably about two kilometers in the air; a much better altitude for starting a long glide. And she did, increasing her speed drastically and quickly out-flying the smaller dragon again.

  
Gliding steadily through the cool air, she looked back every few minutes. To her immense relief, the chasing dragon appeared further and further away every time she looked. After a few dozen minutes, the other dragon had been reduced to a speck on the sky, and seemed to be moving sideways and away from her. The crazy dragon had finally decided to stop chasing her.

  
Her pursuers were gone, for now, and her thoughts went back to the stinging gunshot wounds. Her adrenaline had kept her from really feeling anything during the chase, but now that it was decreasing she could feel each of the other points where she’d been hit; three on her side and belly area, and one on her left wing. But they were nothing compared to the ache in the underside of her jaw.

  
Being the only wound in the range of her telekinesis, she reached in to examine it. It had already stopped bleeding, which was a good sign it had not hit any major blood vessels, but it was deep. Shockingly deep, she realized as she felt around the tissue. She didn’t have any experience with gunshot wounds or surgery in general, but there was no exit wound, so the bullet had to still be inside somewhere. After some more feeling around she sensed a mass of metal, almost touching her jaw bone. As she examined the object, she realized it was not really shaped like a bullet, more like a strange, irregular flattened ball.

  
Whatever the thing was, it was made of lead, so it should definitely not be left in her cheek. She pulled the thing out as quickly as she could, the unpleasant aching increasing as the thing emerged, bringing it in front of her eyes so she could look at the tiny thing more closely. If it had been a bullet, it must have deformed completely when it hit her, because the blood-covered metal ball looked nothing like one.

  
She dropped it, and pondered what her next step should be. First and foremost, she had to find out where she was. She knew she was probably somewhere in France, and she had flown over France before, so getting her bearings should not be too difficult. Looking around, she could not make out any familiar landmarks at this height though, so she decided to climb higher again. After ascending to a high altitude of about 4 km, she spread her wings as wide as they went, gliding slowly as she studied the ground below.

  
Not unlike migratory birds, dragons had a naturally evolved, literally superhuman ability to orient themselves using vague landmarks. After studying the landscape for a few moments, her navigation-sense kicked in, and as her subconscious made sense of the features her position popped into her mind. Sure enough, she was in the middle of France, west of the city Lyon, which should only be about an hours’ flight away.

  
Satisfied to finally have her bearings, she oriented herself towards the large city and increased her weight, quickly accelerating as she glided through the air, descending slowly as she did. At this altitude, she would not have to beat her wings the entire way there, which was nice, and she would arrive within an hour.

  
Nothing but smooth gliding into the safety of the large city, where she would make very sure to inform the police. This whole ordeal had been very frightening, by far the scariest of her life, and part of her just wanted to start flying north, straight back home to her cozy hangar-house in Sweden. But she convinced herself to make the stop. Even though the other gunshot wounds did not hurt very much, she could very well have non-painful but serious internal injuries; getting herself checked out by a medical doctor first would be best.

  
As she glided though the air, she couldn’t help but feel something was off. The landscape below was absolutely France, it was far too similar to be anything else, but at the same time, it did not look quite right… She dismissed her doubts with a snort; it was probably just that she relied too much on GPS. And it had been quite a few years since she had been to France, after all. It was probably not something to worry about.

  
But as she flew the uncanny feeling just seemed to increase; the landscape below her did not match her internal map anywhere near well as it should have. She looked around frantically, trying as hard as she could to find anything to convince her subconscious of her position, but stopped when it just seemed to have the opposite effect, and she could feel herself growing nauseous from the mismatch. It was probably just chock from the terrifying encounter, maybe even some kind of concussion from the bullet that struck her head, throwing her subconscious out of whack. It would probably get better once she approached the familiar city.

  
Except it did not. As she got nearer to the outskirts of the city, even her rational mind noticed the lack of… something. High and far away as she were, it was hard to see the city, but it looked much smaller than she remembered. She could also not see any of the normally very visible warning lights that were supposed to mark out power lines. A power outage, maybe? Shouldn’t those kinds of things have backup batteries?

  
She decided to fly lower, folding her wings into a dive to quickly decrease her altitude before leveling out a few minutes later, letting her observe what was supposed to be the suburbs of Lyon much closer.  
There seemed to be fewer buildings than she remembered, and they were way smaller than they were supposed to be. There were some roads, but they looked small and crooked; the wide, straight motorways that were supposed to come out from all over the city were just gone. And the city itself was just… not Lyon! It had to be, but the skyline looked completely wrong, and none of the buildings looked to be taller than a few stories, and all of them looked very old-style. She glided slowly as she took in the completely surreal sight. How was this even possible? Had she gone completely mad? Maybe some kind of hallucinogenic toxin in the bullets that hit her? She tried to think of something, anything that could explain the strange sight but came up with nothing. The city below her just was not the Lyon she knew, it was too different. How could there be a different Lyon!

  
Suddenly a thought hit her. She almost dismissed it out of hand, as far-fetched as it was, but given the things she had just seen… it almost seemed possible.

  
Johnson, her physicist friend who had put her in this mess, had talked to her extensively about his teams’ very secretive project. She had hardly believed him when he told her they had managed to create a device that (using physics way above her head) could somehow shift the position of objects, warping them a short distance. At first, she thought it had been some kind of uncharacteristic joke, but the human had insisted it was true, saying he wanted her help with something, guaranteeing that it would be worth her time.

Convinced it was some kind of prank, she had jokingly accepted his offer and flown across the Atlantic, only to be completely amazed when the thing actually seemed to work. She had been skeptical at first when the team “teleported” a variety of objects, scorning them for using research funds to set up what had to be nothing but an elaborate magic show, but when they did it with themselves, she realized the thing was really working, somehow. The thing really was swapping the positions of regions of space, teleporting anything inside.

  
It was an incredible accomplishment to be sure, but she had to ask what they wanted her to do. She was a genetic engineer, so the physics involved with the device was not exactly something she could help with. Johnson had then explained his reason for inviting her; to help reveal the device to the public.

The device seemed straight out of science fiction, and if they just demonstrated it themselves, the risk was pretty high that the general public would see it as nothing but trickery; magic tricks involving disappearing and reappearing humans had been around forever, after all. The risk of conspiracy theories running rampant, or even outright public denial that the device even existed in the first place was very high if they just used a human to demonstrate it.

But a dragon, especially a very large one like herself, teleported in front of a large crowd of witnesses and journalists would do a lot to mitigate the risk. Of course, any large object would probably do fine, but a dragon would also draw the most attention.

  
She had agreed to partake in the publicity stunt without any doubts; teleportation seemed like a very interesting thing to experience, and the team would also compensate her generously, which was a pretty nice bonus. They told her would be no rehearsal, though; the thing needed a massive amount of energy to warp even small volumes of space and to teleport her, it had to charge for days, using as much power as a small city while it did.

  
She remembered asking exactly how reliable the thing was. In the beginning, they had had apparently had some problems with objects disappearing, but he assured her the process had been perfected since then and was completely safe (the fact that they were confident enough to use it themselves was pretty convincing). The team also assured her it would work fine despite her size; getting it to work consistently in the first place had been the hard part, just scaling it up would not affect anything. So much for that assurance, something had definitely gone very, very wrong…

  
He had mentioned that the objects that disappeared early on must have gone into another universe of some sort, or they would not have been able to warp them back again. Was it possible that it had warped her into one of these other universes, and it just happened to be very similar to her own, except civilization was much less developed? But if there were infinite universe-dimensions that should be ridiculously unlikely, statistically impossible. Maybe the short-distance limitation of the teleporter had also ensured the universe-dimension she ended up in was not too unlike her own?  


As crazy as the idea was, it would explain how everything looked both alien and familiar at the same time, the strange dragon, the lack of any modern infrastructure, and, well, pretty much everything unusual she’d seen so far. It was a bizarre working hypothesis, and even she wasn’t convinced it was correct; it was probably much more likely this was all in her mind as some kind of comatose dream after all. But if it was correct, and she was trapped in some sort of hostile mirror universe… She snapped out of her thoughts as she realized she was still headed straight towards the city. She had to get out of here, now!

  
She turned around and flew south, and started climbing to an altitude where she was unlikely to be seen, thinking about the bizarre situation she did. She needed somewhere safe to land. Somewhere safe and far away from here, or any other parts of this strange, potentially dangerous civilization. She thought for a moment, and then an idea popped into her mind. Yes, it would make a good spot…

  
After about an hour and a half of flying south-west, she reached her destination. A remote grill, located in the mountainous terrain far below her, one she had visited once before while on vacation. There were not too many restaurants that could serve dragons her size, especially this far away from any major cities, so she remembered most of them pretty well, and the one below was no exception.

When she visited some years back, it had been a pretty crowded day and she had been too big to fit on the main terrace. The staff had been kind and considerate though, insisting she could stay, going through the effort of laying out tarpaulins on the grass for her to lie on, and they even gave her a free tub of bearnaise sauce for her trouble! The vat-grown tenderloin they served had been very good as well, the car-sized slab of lightly cooked meat so tender she could bite off nicely sized chunks with ease.

  
But good memories were not the reason she had chosen to go here. No, it was because the remote grill would be an ideal place to test her hypothesis. If this was still the normal world, and she was somehow just imagining all this, she was sure the helpful staff would help her out (probably by giving her directions to the nearest psychiatric hospital). But more importantly, if the opposite was true, and this was some kind of medieval mirror universe with hostile French people, she did not risk being attacked by anyone after landing, because then the grill would not exist and the remote spot should just be empty wilderness. In that case, she could land and tend to her wounds in safety, rest, and figure out what to do next.

  
She closed her wings and descended in a steep dive, ground quickly approaching as she did, leveling out 100 meters above the site. She did not see anyone or anything, so she landed, and sure enough, it was completely void of any signs of activity. The rock faces and lake were absolutely identical to how she remembered them, but the sign, the terrace, and the building itself were just not there! It was unlikely they’d go out of business, not with how popular flying in the mountains were, and even if the building had been demolished there should have at least been some remnants. But there was just nothing!

  
Well, this pretty much confirmed it, she realized to her horror. She really was trapped in another world and was also probably hunted by the ancient military of this version of France. At least she had put a lot of distance between herself and any signs of civilization, and she had looked back now and then to make sure she was not followed. Staying here would probably be safe for the time being. She reached her head around and began pulling out the other bullets, or rather lead balls, projectiles of some kind of precursor to modern firearms, luckily not as deadly because none of the balls were deeper than a decimeter.

  
The hours of flying had taken their toll, and she was beginning to feel hungry. She really could do with some of that tenderloin right now, she thought as she looked towards the nonexistent grill. Surviving in the wild was not something she had ever wanted to do. Flying long distances and stopping to rest and eat at well-stocked restaurants was nice and all, but only because there was food! Just flying in some random direction without checking there were stops along the way was crazy. All of this was crazy, completely insane! And she was stuck here, stuck with mad people in a mad world, in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat. If she wasn’t torn to pieces by a gang of brutes, she’d starve to death in days! She would die! She didn’t want to die, not here, not like this! She was pulled from her thoughts as she heard something behind her. She snapped around, just to see it was her tail, lashing back and forth from her distress.

  
She forced herself to calm down. She had to remain calm and rational; panicking and doing something stupid would get her killed for sure. She walked down to the lake and started drinking, the cold meltwater calming as she thought about her situation. Her disappearance would definitely have been sensational back home, and Johnson and the team were probably working overtime to get her back. Surely they would be able to warp her back soon, just like the other disappeared objects. She just needed to hold out until they did, then all would be good and well, but she had to figure out how to survive until then.

  
First and foremost, she needed to find food. Preferably a regular source of it; there was no telling how long she would be stuck here, and running out was not an option. She had never been good or interested in history, but artificially grown meat was definitely a recent invention, so her only source of food would be animals.

  
In the wild, she knew dragons used to be predators, catching wild animals to kill and eat. She supposed she could try that. But prey animals were very good at running away, specifically adapted to it, and natural dragons specifically adapted to hunt prey were nowhere near as large as her, probably for a reason. She doubted she could catch enough animals to survive.

  
Another option was to find a French animal farm, and steal from it. She had seen plenty of fields on her way here, and if this world really was stuck in the past, some of them would definitely have animals trapped via fence; it was how all meat used to be produced. It would probably be a lot riskier than hunting though since she would have to fly closer to civilization, but it would probably be much easier.

  
She realized the already pretty bad food situation was only made worse by her genetically engineered body. Her breed had not been designed with food shortages in mind; she had smaller energy stores and higher metabolism than the more efficient dragons found in nature. Instead, the Norrland Gold was completely focused on telekinetic sensitivity and precision. Compared to other dragon breeds with flight-unrelated functional antigrav nodules, those in her breed were extremely weak and small. Weak, but the over-sized brain-stem contained an incredible number of them, each of the functional units individually controlled and capable of projecting weak but precise gravitational fields. When working in tandem, they allowed for precise manipulation and examination of objects; they were the source of her telekinetic ability. They were also the reason her breed had to be heavyweight in the first place; smaller breeds were way more convenient (both for the dragons themselves and for others) but a brain-stem large enough it could contain enough nodules would just not fit in a smaller body. Which left her breed as one of the very few heavyweight ones still being actively propagated.

  
While the telekinesis was weak, with training, the incredible number of nodules provided enough precision to directly examine and rearrange individual molecules or even atoms; an invaluable ability in many modern sciences and industries, especially in biotech and genetic engineering.

  
Incredibly useful for examining and altering sequences of DNA back home, but far too weak to be very useful for surviving in the wild. It was difficult to lift anything heavier than a few dozen kilograms, and trying to lift something like a human would do nothing but give her a headache. At least her front feet were pretty dexterous, so using them for heavier things usually worked pretty well.

  
When the Norrland Gold was designed, the glide-flying ability had been more of an afterthought. After all the telekinesis-optimizing features of the breed had been finalized, the body structure turned out pretty slim, so it had made sense to make the flight glide-based. It meant she could not carry as much as other breeds of comparable size, but the increased speed was definitely worth it, and flying for hours without beating her wings was very nice, especially for long distances. Her modified flight glands were able to vary their anti-gravity effect across a much wider range than those found in nature, very inefficient and burning an incredible amount calories in the process but they allowed for pretty rapid climbs (at least for her size). Combined with her glide-optimized wings, they were what enabled her rapid glide-flying in the first place, and that ability would be very helpful for staying alive.

  
On the other hand, in terms of self-defense, she was in a pretty terrible spot. Her talons were small and dull by design, great for grabbing things without accidentally stabbing them but she could probably not harm another dragon with them if she tried. Her wing-talons were slightly larger, and she might be able to sharpen them against a cliff or something, but if someone got near her fragile wings she would probably fare a lot worse than them. One silver lining was that she was pretty strong, and her bite force was probably decent as well, but if she if got caught and had to fight it against what was probably several very experienced, military-trained opponents with sharp talons it would not end well, even if they were much smaller than her. Not to mention the humans with firearms that would be shooting at her at the same time.

  
No, it was probably best to keep as low a profile as possible, to stay hidden, and just fly away from threats. She had managed to out-fly one hostile dragon without much issue; he seemed to have trouble keeping up even when she ascended, and she lost him quickly when she increased her speed by gliding. If that was anything to go by, she would hopefully be able to out-fly other threats as well. Hopefully.

  
As for food, the farm option seemed better and better the more she thought about it (and the hungrier she got). In addition to being easier to get a hold of in the first place, the animals there would probably be better fed and much larger than those found in nature. And with the rope, she could probably make off with enough to last her some time, too.

  
Yes, now that she thought about it finding and robbing an animal farm was definitely her best option, but it would be risky. Very risky, especially considering she did not really know the capabilities of the ancient military force she was up against. She needed to be smart about it, figure out the safest way possible e to get what she was after and fly back, to throw off any pursuers before landing and hiding.

  
Satisfied to at least have some idea of what to do, the golden dragon stopped drinking and began drawing in the soil instead, tail waving back and forth uneasily as she crafted the sneaky plan, working out the details of what would have to be a very daring heist…


	3. Chapter 3

It was done. She was not much of a criminal mastermind, but the plan she had worked out should work. There was no reason it shouldn’t, at least. And how hard could something like this really be? Criminals did it all the time. Granted, they were usually caught afterward, but she had a pretty good plan, so without modern equipment, her foes should have a really hard time tracking her. But she decided to go over the details one more time, to make sure she got it right.

She would set off about an hour from sunset, to make sure she had enough sunlight to find a suitable animal farm in the first place. That way, by the time she was finished at the farm it would be too dark for anyone to chase her, which was very important since gliding would be impossible while carrying literal tons of animals. She would also have to rest when she was done, which would leave her very vulnerable for quite a few hours, so it was very important she was able to slip away unseen.

Retreating using the cover of the night would make her much harder to find, but it would make the operation harder for herself as well, or at least the flying-back part. If she wasn’t careful, she might not find her way back, and if she got lost and had to sleep near a city she was almost guaranteed to be found and killed. Fortunately, she had a plan for this as well.

Flying in the dark was usually not much of a problem; all modern GPS-goggles had built-in heat cameras to avoid collisions, and as long as you followed the map you would end up where you wanted, even if it was a bit unnerving not being able to see the ground at all. Night flying was also possible without any, though not exactly recommended (or legal); even then there were plenty of lit-up roads and other landmarks on the ground you could follow, and there were plenty of lit up landing spots, especially around cities. Here, in this world, that would not be the case at all. So she would have to be creative. 

When her breed was designed almost four decades ago (well, four decades ago in her world at least), dragon night vision goggles or even pocket-sized computers had not been much of a thing. There had also been a recent string of incidents involving dragons, aerial collisions above noisy cities with lethal outcomes that had put pressure on her designers to mitigate this risk. And so they had, by adding some infrared photoreceptor cells to the retina. The cells were few, too few to see in the infrared spectrum with any sort of clarity, but enough to serve their purpose; in complete darkness, she could see the blurry silhouette of warm, heat-emitting things. 

She had tried it out decades ago as part of a mandatory night-flying course but had not been very keen on trying it out since. Compared to her regular vision it felt like flying blind, and it was impossible to tell how far away the cold ground was, which was probably the single most important thing to keep track of when gliding. But she could see other dragons well enough to avoid them even if she could not hear them, and even tell approximately how far away they were; wonky as it was, it pretty much worked as intended. In the age of high-definition night vision-enabled flight goggles she would never rely on it though, even on the few occasions she actually flew at night.

But now this strange feature would be very useful. It would allow her to spot others in the middle of the night almost as far away as the horizon, long before she could hear them, and hopefully let her avoid them long before they could give chase. Since she didn’t have to beat her wings while gliding she was also very silent, making her even harder to detect at night. This, combined with her speed, would hopefully be enough for her to fly without much risk of detection.

Infrared vision was not a very useful thing to have, and almost never evolved naturally. Eyes were adapted to perceive the visual spectrum for a reason (they were the wavelengths the sun emitted most of, after all), and receiving other wavelengths made little sense for most animals; an increased number of and sensitivity in regular photoreceptor cells was a much shorter evolutionary pathway to night vision than evolving a completely new type of cell for a spectrum with less light overall. But even if she wasn’t the only dragon in this world to see in the dark, she would be the only one with the ability to see infrared light. Which wasn’t very useful in and of itself, but she would use it to her advantage.

She had selected one of the nearby grassy flat areas to use as a nighttime landing spot and scratched out an X in the ground, making it larger than needed to allow for some error. At each of the four ends, she laid out round foundations of large stones, marking out the improvised landing zone. Just lighting large fires on top of these would have worked pretty well as landing lights, but they would be too visible like that. From high up, the fires would be seen for dozens of kilometers, and her hiding spot would be found out instantly if she was followed. And even if she managed to get rid of all pursuers before landing, the risk was way too high that a random patrol would see the fires (which would stand out very well in the darkness) while she was gone.

To avoid this, she had purposefully added very little wood to each of them, to make sure they would not burn for more than an hour or two. The idea was that the fires would go out before night fell, but the rocks would still be very hot and glow pretty brightly in infrared for several hours afterward, acting as beacons only her IR-vision could perceive. This way she would be able to safely find her way back; even a few kilometers up, the rocks would stand out very well against the cold ground, and she could get her heading wrong or drift by quite a bit while flying back and still find the spot. Since there were three of them she could use them to see exactly how far away the ground was, so they would also enable her to land safely in the dark. Yes, this should work, but there was one last thing she needed to tend to. Her scales.

It was very trendy among breed designers to give genetically altered breeds unusual colorations and features. Hers was no different; the almost metallic-looking, bright golden scales that were the namesake of her breed were the result of a complex artificial pigment, created completely for looks. Not that she was complaining though; gold was her favorite color, and she was very fond of her scales. But they were not exactly discreet, and what she was about to do would need a lot of discretion. Which was why she was currently digging a hole in the grass beside the lake.

With a few mouthfuls of water from the lake and a bit of stirring, she had turned the hole into a pit of dark mud. She wasn’t too excited about the thing she was about to do, but this was a matter of survival after all. Her shiny scales would just be too easy to spot, especially in the dark.

She ran her tail through the pit experimentally and found it got very well covered in the stuff, the thick mud clinging to her scales very well. She quickly covered the rest of her body in the stuff, using her telekinesis to levitate globs of it to smear across areas she could not dip into the pit directly. Soon enough the black-brown coat of camouflage was done. 

It wasn’t exactly hygienic, but even if it decreased her chance of getting caught and killed a tiny bit, it was completely worth it. When she was home safely, the first she would do was wash, but right now all that mattered was surviving until she was.

She checked the position of the sun in the sky often as she waited. It was hard to tell the time exactly, but it looked as if there were a few more hours of daylight left. It was better to set out a little too early than too late; if she didn’t manage to find food in time before the sunset she would have to go hungry. And that was not something she intended to do.

Deciding the time was right, she launched into the air again, heading north along her memorized route.

* * *

She stayed close to the ground as she glided, close enough to see if any of the fields below had fences around them, but hopefully still high enough to not be spotted too easily. So far it was going really well; she had found several farms, some with plenty of cows, and she had not seen any other dragons yet despite looking around constantly. To her pleasant surprise, the cow farms were very common, so she had decided to alter her plan slightly; she would raid one as far away from her hideout as possible. That way they would probably have a harder time tracking her, which was especially important if she ended up doing this often.

After some more flying, she found another large one. The sun was just about to go down over the horizon, so it would do fine. She made sure to get her bearings before she descended, using the fields below to memorize the direction of the nonexistent-grill-turned-hideout one last time before the sun went down. She circled it a couple of times, making sure there were no other dragons in the air around her.

She continued her circling but turned her attention to the field, and the cows in it. There were 27 of them, all together in a herd, like herd animals were supposed to behave, some laying down while others stood grazing. She made sure not to spook them by beating her wings, and fortunately, none of the animals seemed to look up.

There were some buildings about half a kilometer away from the herd, probably related to cow farming and maybe even where the farmers lived, but she was not too worried. She was a huge dragon, after all, and farmers were probably not very well-armed. And she wouldn’t have to bother with them anyway; she’d be long gone by the time they realized what had happened.

She decided the time was right and dived down to the field. She felt a strange feeling of excitement as she swooped down towards her target, right onto one of the laying cows, landing on top of it and pinning it with her foretalons before it could run away. The other animals ran away as expected, she would chase them later, but first, she just needed to reach into the spine and slaughter the cow.

But what was not expected was the screaming. She went stiff from the harrowing sound, looking around for a moment, terrified she’d stepped on someone before she realized it was the cow. But cows were not supposed to scream? But it did, the awful wailing stunning her, leaving her staring at the animal in horror as it just screamed and screamed. She instinctually pulled back her foreleg, but the animal did not get up. She realized she had crushed its entire hind section, it looked horribly disfigured as it tried to get away. Stunned, she stared in horror at the mangled cow as it struggled. It was too late to do anything else now; she had to euthanize the suffering animal. She reached her head down to the animal and tried to reach into its spine like planned, to kill it instantly by severing it, but it would just not stay still, head flailing around wildly as she tried and failed to end the poor animal’s suffering. Finally, she reached her head down around its neck, closing her eyes as she bit down hard, not opening them again until it had stopped moving.

She let go of it and took a step back, just staring at the dead cow, the taste of blood in her mouth as she looked at the dead animal. Killing animals had been part of the plan of course, but she could never have imagined it would be like this. The horrible scream, the way it struggled for its life, how it rattled when she finally managed to kill it… She felt awful, all of this was awful, and she half just wanted to fly away, forget it ever happened. But she reminded herself there was no other option, just one cow would not last her long. Awful as it was she had to complete the plan.

It didn’t help her conscience that she could feel herself salivating from the blood in her mouth. And even less so when she felt the sudden urge to tear into the dead animal as if it was a steak. She’d always thought about cows as fun little animals that just ate grass and went moo, and never really made the connection to the meat she ate regularly. That was just cells after all, heavily modified to only grow into muscle tissue, not forming a semi self-aware animal; no one was harmed in the process. Nothing like this.

She shook her head form the unwanted outburst. Calm and rational. She had to remain calm and rational. She was deep in the hostile territory and doing something stupid, like not sticking to the plan, was likely to get her killed. She lifted the carcass with her fore talons, feeling its weight. She would probably be able to fly with five of these, she estimated. Which meant she had a lot more killing to do.

She reluctantly set out on foot after the rest of the herd. It had run to the other side of the field, but they were prevented from going further by the fence.

As she approached the herd, she felt the strange feeling of excitement again, urging her to chase the animals. Probably just hunting instincts kicking in, pathetic as it was; catching the already trapped cows was like shooting fish in a barrel. At least it helped her ignore the depravity of it all, she thought she picked her next target.

The herd was on the alert and took off again when she got close, but she managed to grab another one, making sure not to hurt the cow before breaking its neck with her mouth. Nowhere near as cruel as her botched first attempt, but she could not help but flinch as she sank her teeth into the helpless animal. She killed three more cows and collected all five of them together.

She just stared at them in silence for a moment. As terrible as it was, this was necessary. They were probably going to be slaughtered at some point anyway; this was a cow farm after all. But humans would probably do it much more humanely than she ever could; not scaring the animals do death before doing it was definitely much kinder.

The fact that some part of her had enjoyed it just made her feel even worse. It was just instincts, she tried to tell herself, useless behaviors engrained into the old parts of her brain, triggering without any conscious thought from her stalking the cows. She had no control over it, so blaming herself for it was stupid. Blaming herself for any of this was stupid, desperate times call for desperate measures after all. And imminent starvation was about as desperate as things got. Feeling a bit better from being completely justified, she carried on. 

She used her telekinetics to tie the animals together by the neck, creating a sort of morbid, upside-down bouquet of cow carcasses that would be easy to carry beneath her as she flew. She crouched down onto her belly and tied the other end around her withers to make sure the heavy haul was as close to her center as possible and rose up to test the arrangement. It should work.

Before she could take off and leave this entire mess behind her there was one last thing she needed to do. Never having eaten a real cow before, she was not sure how exactly it was supposed to be done, so she would have to find out.

Morbid as the carcasses were, they definitely smelled good, especially the very bloody ones. Her mind was apparently set on seeing the things as a vat-steaks, and the urge to just eat one unprepared just increased by the second. But she reminded herself she could not just tear into one as if it was a uniform slab of meat; this was a real animal, so there would be non-edible parts inside. She probably needed to butcher it, to separate the edible parts from the non-edible ones. Which was something most natural dragons probably did with their talons, not something she’d be able to do with her dull ones, at least not without risking ruining it. 

She got an idea and looked over towards buildings again. This was a cow farm, so it would make a lot of sense for there to some kind of butchering facility nearby. Hopefully one of the houses would be one, with proper tools for the job. She checked the cows were secure again and began walking towards the buildings. 

As she approached, she saw one of the buildings was a barn, and another was a residential house of some kind. It was very late now and there seemed to be no one around to see her. It did not look like anyone was home, but she blocked the front door with the cows, just in case.

She turned her attention to the barn. The double doors were large, more than large enough to fit cows inside, which was pretty promising. She undid the cabin hook with her telekinesis and slowly opened the doors, peeking inside and seeing no one. She carefully reached her head in to take a better look around the inside. Sure enough, in one corner of the mostly empty barn was a large table, clearly used recently for butchering. On the wall above it was a bunch of knives and saws and other metal tools. Perfect! This was pretty much exactly what she had been looking for!

She backed out of the barn with and quickly untied one of the cow carcasses from the rest, picking it up and carrying it in her mouth into the building, placing it down onto the table. Never having butchered an animal before, she wasn’t very sure about how it was done, and considering cows would be her only source of food for now it would be very useful to find out how to do it properly. She would have plenty of time as well; there was at least half an hour before it was dark enough to take off safely. 

She had performed quite a few dissections while studying at the Institute, mostly smaller animals and a few dead sheep, and wondered if a similar approach would be best. That way she could find and take out all the potentially edible the parts first, and then sample them one by one to find out which were good and not. That way she could work out a method to quickly extract the edible parts of cows later. Yes, doing it like that was probably best.

She reached out with her telekinesis towards one of the steel knives, and picked it up, feeling its weight. It was not like the delicate scalpels she had used before, but the edge was definitely very sharp; it should get to work done. Without another thought she began disassembling the carcass, quickly losing herself as she performed the practiced procedure. Not having any physical limbs meant she could work very quickly, and before long the former cow had been reduced to hardly anything but a skeleton, all of the organs and muscles laid out neatly beside it. 

As expected, the muscles were very good, which was why muscle tissue was used for food back home. To her surprise, the heart, lungs, and other organs were not too bad either; she found herself eating all of them too. She decided to leave the head, and the hooves did not look very appetizing either, but other than that the entire animal could probably be eaten. That simplified things quite a lot; she could probably just bite off the head and hooves, skin it, remove the digestive system, and then just eat the rest. A procedure that would be easy to with the new tools she intended to borrow indefinitely. 

Finally having some food in her felt really good, but she was still pretty hungry and felt an urge to eat another one. She stopped herself; she had to fly back to safety, and while carrying four heavy cows. Overeating now would make that flight much harder, so it was better to wait until she was in the safety of the grill. The single cow would have to do for now. 

Satisfied with having learned how to eat cows, she looked around for a moment, searching for something to store the tools in. Metal tools like these would probably be very hard to come by, so it would be best to take as many as she could, and even the ones she didn’t recognize might prove useful later. It wasn’t as if stealing them made much of a difference; their cost was probably nothing compared to the cows she’d already stolen. She finally found a sack of some kind, probably for crops judging by the smell, but it felt pretty durable. She levitated it over to the wall and shoved the rest of the tools into it one by one, and grabbed some buckets metal pots, and other knick-knacks as well. They did not weigh much, so there was no reason to grab as much of the stuff as she could. She closed the sack and slowly backed out of the barn, carefully carrying with her teeth as she did; it had become too heavy to levitate easily. 

Once outside, she walked back to the main building and the cows, but she saw a light next to the house. That hadn’t been there before. She focused on it and saw figures. There were people! Where’d they come from? Maybe the house had a back door?

Standing about 50 meters from her were two humans, one holding a lantern, both just looking at her. They did not have any uniforms, so that was pretty reassuring. They were probably unarmed farmers and would be harmless to her, but she still felt a sting of guilt from being caught red-handed like this. How long had they been watching her while her head was in the barn? And why had they not said anything?

She suddenly remembered the other farmers. They were probably just as afraid of her as they had been. But, telescoping in on their faces, judging by their facial expression did not look scared. A bit hard to read from this distance, but eyebrows frowning like that were supposed to signal annoyance or anger in humans. That wasn’t what she expected.

Maybe wild dragons stealing animals like this happened pretty often? And wild dragons taking some cows every now and then was just an annoyance? Either way, blatant as it was, she was too large for the humans to stop her even if they tried. She decided to just pretend to not see them and started tying the tool sack to the rest of the cows, readying herself to take off. 

But before she did that another idea appeared in her mind. She had no idea how this world worked, or even what the date was! If she could communicate with them she might get some really useful information.

She hesitated for a moment. Speaking French would definitely blow her cover as a wild dragon (if her size had not already done that), but getting information was probably worth it. Suddenly a very devious idea came to her. Yes, that way she might even get away without the military being informed… She decided to call out.

\- ”Bonsoir! Je suis… Julie Pierre! Je suis avec l’armée. Votre vaches sont très bon!”

(”Good evening! I am… Julie Pierre! I’m with the army. Your cows are very good!”)

The humans stood still for a moment before one of them cupped his hands around his mouth. They must have understood! He shouted her very angrily though, something about there not being an order, but that was about as much as she understood. He continued on for some time before stopping. Having understood pretty much nothing of what the man just said, she responded as best she could.

\- ”Uh, Je suis vraiment desolée du dérangement. Quelle est la date? Est quelle année?”

(”Uh, sorry for the inconvenience. What date is it? And what year?”)

The man answered by continuing shouting at her, but this time could make out a date from the man’s response. The 20th of May, 1807! It did not tell her anything in particular, and even if she knew what happened on this day in her own world it would probably not applicable here, but at least it was not too far away in time. Well, two and a half centuries was quite a difference, but still. At least she could still communicate, the man was clearly insisting there not being an order. Presumably, this farm was supplying the French dragons, who probably sent out orders in advance. This must be why the farmers were not fazed by her; dragons probably came here to collect cows all the time.

\- ”Mais je… j'ai un ordre. Du roi! Je prends cinq grosses vaches le 20 mai. Et l'équipement. Je veux dire, des outils. Dans quelques mois, le roi vais payer!”

(”But I… I do have an order. From the king! I take five large cows on the seventh of May. And the equipment. I mean, tools. In a few months, the king will pay!)

In her mind, the farmer would happily accept and let her go without reporting this; the king’s order was supposed to be absolute, after all. But it just seemed to upset the farmer, who claimed there was no king, that the king was decapitated a decade ago in some kind of revolution, and something about an emperor of the french empire. A french emperor?

If this was 1807, then France should still have a king and not an emperor. She wasn’t great at history, but she was very sure France had remained a monarchy for the entire 19th century, and it was only after a series of horrific wars at the beginning of the 20th century most European countries had slowly become liberal democracies. And the monarchy  in France  had definitely not been overthrown by some revolution two hundred years before then. This world may be a lot more different than she thought… 

Well, her attempt to trick the farmer had clearly failed miserably. As the old man continued ranting at her, she realized it had gotten dark enough to fly back, so she quickly finished tying the rope around the tool bag. She tied the other end around her withers again, testing to make sure they would not fall off before launching into the air. The cows were pretty heavy, and she had to beat her wings every few seconds just to stay in the air, but she should be able to fly back to the grill with all four of them. It would just take a few hours longer than hoped. And some luck; if someone managed to spot her, this she would have to dump the cows to getaway.

* * *

The rest of the flight back went without any issues. The only dragon silhouettes she saw in the dark were very far away, and they did not even look like they were searching for anyone. Probably just random patrols.

After the hours of unnerving flying she was exhausted and had been really relieved when she finally saw the stones she had prepared, the round things still hot and very visible, at least to her IR-vision. Blind as she was, she descended slowly in the middle of them, hind legs outstretched, relieved when she felt them touch the grass below. She dropped down on all fours and quickly untied the cows, letting them drop to the ground. Finally, she could eat some more.

While she couldn’t see anything, she had no trouble sensing the carcass with her telekinesis, so preparing one of them was no problem, and hungry as she was she downed the entire thing in minutes.

After finishing the meal she was too tired to do anything else, so she laid down on the grass and curled into a ball. What felt like the longest day of her life was finally over, and she had no time to reflect on the bizarre events before sleep took her. Her final thought hoping she would wake up back home, that all of this would turn out to be nothing but a bizarre dream that would finally come to an end. But little did she know, it was only the beginning…


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter, finally! Sorry it took so long, I write pretty sporadically as is and the end of summer does not help. But if there is interest I'll try to post a new chapter every two weeks or so.
> 
> Anyways, enjoy!

It was a warm morning, and the sun was just rising as she scratched another day to the improvised calendar. Had it only been three weeks? It felt like an eternity had passed, and the world she called home seemed like nothing but a distant memory.

She had been confident she would be back home soon, that the team just had some difficulties and would warp her back any time. But as the days went by she slowly lost hope, and if they had not managed to bring her back by now, then they would probably never be able to. She really was stuck here, she thought with a quiet whine.

At least she didn’t go hungry. Raiding cow farms turned out to be pretty easy, and was nothing but a tedious routine at this point; every fifth day or so she would set out in the evening, find a new one, and fly back. She had even made an improvised carrying harness, which spread the weight better and allowed her to take off with a dozen cows every time. So the raids did not have to be as frequent as she feared at the start. And using a nearby permafrozen mountain top as a refrigerator, she had even built up a stockpile of cows, so if she became unable to raid more she’d have food for a while.

To store other things, she just tied them to her horns. Even back home she would hang things on them habitually; they were always within range of her telekinesis, so they were just really convenient for it. Since the loss of her reliable chestpack, they had quickly become her main way of storing things, and since she found loads of useful things every raid it had become pretty crowded back there.

But as good as she had gotten at stealing, the French had definitely taken note of her by now. The increased number of patrols meant finding a suitable farm had become more difficult, but the huge number of farms meant she could usually find an unguarded one. She was more worried about them looking for her hideout; if they found her while sleeping, then that would definitely be the end of her.

So even though this way of living kind of worked, for now, it was definitely not sustainable. And even if the French somehow never managed to find her hideout her (which they definitely would given enough time), she did not want to live like this. Sulking in the middle of nowhere, literally covered in dirt, slowly wasting away while bored out of her mind. It really was a pitiful existence.

She knew the lack of rescue meant she would have to contact civilization at some point. But thought of all the ways it could go wrong really scared her. In her world’s past dragons had not been treated very well at all, neither in Europe nor most of the world; she was pretty sure they had not even been considered sentient; nothing but biological war machines to order into battle. So it was not as if she could just waltz into a city and surrender; she would be treated like an animal, and her current situation would seem like paradise in comparison to they might force her to do.

No, before she did anything of the sort she would have to ensure she would be treated fairly. And, even limited as her historical knowledge was, she knew she would probably have to fly quite a ways away from Europe to end up someplace where that was likely.

But before she set out on a project like flying across the world, she would need information. She needed to know a good place to go in the first place, and what route to take. But just general information about the world would be very important as well if she was going to stay here long-term.

Long story short, she needed to find someone with a lot of information. And it had to be someone who spoke English rather than French. Unfortunately, she had only encountered a single person this far who did, and that was the captain who shot her.

Even though that had not ended well, he had spoken English, so other dragon captains probably did too. And if anyone would know a lot about the world this long in the past, it would probably be military personnel. It was pretty likely they’d have maps or other information too, maybe even flight-maps for dragons, with food spots marked. Now, that would be really handy.

So she just needed to find a dragon small enough to not pose a threat, interrogate the captain, steal their maps, and then she would be on her merry way with all the information she could ever need. And if the first one she found did not have any info, she’d just have to look for other dragons until she found one that did.

A bit risky, but it should work, and it sure beats just sitting around waiting to be found. Yes, she would do it, and doing it sooner rather than later would be best. Eager to finally have something to do, she went to work scribbling out a plan for this next exploit.

* * *

She set out the same afternoon, flying north and turning randomly now and then as usual to conceal the direction of the hideout. It felt like a routine cow-mission, but this was nothing like it; now she would take an actual person. And even though she was going to let them go afterward, legally speaking this was kidnapping, and she could not help but feel a bit uneasy about doing it. But she tried to not think about it that way; these people were trying to kill her. Gently grabbing one of them out of the air to ask them some questions was the least she could do in return.

During farthest raids, she had spotted many dragons flying straight routes, always alone and ignoring her. Probably couriers; snail mail was pretty much the only way of communicating across distances before electronic options were invented, so it made sense for there to be plenty of them. And they would be lightweight breeds, too, since those were the fastest. All this made them ideal targets; plenty to choose from, and too small to really be that dangerous. And if they dealt with foreign mail, chances were high they knew other languages, too, so that was another bonus.

After a few hours of flight, she had reached her planned destination, north-west of Lyon. She had decided to put herself in the line from the city to Paris; hopefully right in the path of any mail carriers flying between the two cities.

She stayed in place there, circling as high as she comfortably could to minimize the risk of detection. Even though there was daylight, she would look like nothing but a dark spot at this a high altitude, so even if she was seen she’d probably be mistaken or a bird or something. And it made no sense for non-gliders to fly anywhere near this high, so she would get the jump on anyone flying the route.

She only had to wait for about half an hour before she saw someone, headed for Lyon. She decided to wait until they passed below before following them. Once they had passed under, she dived, quickly losing enough altitude to get a better look, but still staying high enough above them to no be detected.

The other dragon was much closer in size to most dragons back home; maybe one fifth her own, with a red-brown coloration. Sure enough, he had a human on his back, two humans even she realized as she flew closer. She would have preferred someone even smaller because his oversized talons looked like they could hurt. But she could not be that picky; he would have to do.

She carefully flew closer, above and behind the small dragon. Even though she could not have been more than two hundred meters above them, neither the dragon nor the two humans seemed to take note of her. This was understandable; the sun’s position in the sky meant her shadow would not pass over them, and she was pretty silent. And being attacked like this was probably not a thing that happened to couriers very often, either.

As she stalked them from above, making sure not to beat her wings, she pondered how to go about this. She could just nose dive and slam into them, but that would be pretty risky; she might hurt dragon or even kill the humans if she hit him wrong. Instead, she opted for a slow descent, or at least slow enough so she could brake at the last second and grab the smaller dragon somewhat gently before he could fly away.

As the red-brown dragon quickly approached, she reached out her foretalons, readying herself to grab him by the hind. He was totally oblivious to the huge dragon’s approach, at least until the last moment when he suddenly turned his head and looked straight at her.

Fully expecting the small dragon to dive instantly, she did not open her wings to brake as planned, readying herself to dive after. But when she realized the other dragon’s reaction was no reaction at all, it was too late to brake.

She bumped into his lower back, luckily missing the humans, but taking the dragon with her as she started plummeting. Despite the collision, she managed to grab his tail just below the wings, and reaching out with her right foretalon, she managed to grab the stunned dragons’ neck as well. With the smaller dragon firmly between both her foretalons, she turned him sideways to make sure he realized he was caught.

”I got you! Abandonnez! Surrender! And stop beating your-” she started, but suddenly the smaller dragon began struggling violently, reaching up and scratching viciously at her foreleg. Her scales mitigated the clawing, but it hurt regardless as the smaller dragon tore at them. ”Ow! What the hell are you doing!? Stop! Or I’ll-” but she suddenly shrieked out in pain.

The smaller dragon had struck a sensitive, less scaled portion between her claws, and made a gash that stung like hell; the sting soon joined by a bizarre warm pulsing sensation. Swiveling her head around, she saw the smaller dragon mercilessly tearing at her leg and talons, and realized to her horror she was bleeding profusely from the long cut.

Startled, she almost let go of him. She forced herself not to, tightening her grip instead, hoping that would make him stop. But it did not, and as she saw the little menace trying to reach up and cut her in the same place again, an immense rage suddenly came over her. Snarling madly, she felt an overwhelming urge to bite him, to close her jaws around her foe’s neck, bite down and crush it like a cow. Rearing back, jaws wide, she prepared to strike at him, but stopped herself at the last minute.

What was she thinking? She realized to her horror she had been about to kill the guy. She shook the terrifying thought out of her head. The weeks of isolation must have been getting to her harder than she thought. She’d go to great length to survive, but she’d never do something as horrible murder anyone; that was just out of the question. And it would be overkill for self-defense against this guy.

She gave the dragon a few violent shakes instead. A bit too violent, maybe, but it had the desired effect; the other dragon was stunned. But only for a moment; he was quickly recovering, rasing his foreleg to try and claw at her again.

As she was about to shake him again, one of the humans suddenly called out:

”We surrender! We surrender!”

”Then tell him to stop cutting me!”

There were some French shouting, and the small dragon seemed to listen and calm down, but he was still tense in her grasp.

She spread her wings as far as she could, stopping the free fall by going into a rapid but controlled dive, soon leveling out into a glide.

Fortunately, the smaller dragon kept his flight glands inflated as if he was still flying, so he was light enough for gliding to be possible. But holding another dragon sideways like this was not very aerodynamic, so she would not get too far.

She decided to land out of the way to the west, slowly descending as glided. She could hear the humans shouting, but she had no intention to stop gliding and hear them out, not before they were firmly on the ground. But when she felt the smaller dragon wheezing for a minute straight, she realized something was wrong.

She slowed the glide and reached her head down and around. The small dragon was coughing, and it did not sound like a normal cough, either. She decided to check on his lungs, maybe she’d somehow manage to knock the breath out of him. But that was definitely not it. The main oxygen exchange unit looked inflamed, and some of the oxygen-exchanging parabronchi even seemed to be leaking fluid.

She wasn’t a medical doctor, but this amount fluid free in the lungs was definitely not a good sign. She took a closer look at the fluid, and noticed it contained a large quantitive of dead white blood cells; he must have had a pretty serious lung infection of some kind. And it seemed to be slowly dripping down and into one of the airway-connected flight glands below, where it clogged the keratinous filter at the entrance to the sack-like organ, as well as pooling at the bottom.

Well, that explained the coughing and wheezing. The flight-glands had evolved from air sacs and still played a major role in pushing air through the lungs, so having one of them basically out of commission would definitely affect breathing. And were pretty sensitive too, so flying with one clogged and partially filled with fluid was would not be very pleasant.

It was something he should get checked out before the infection spread to the rest of the lung. But then again, medical technology had been pretty much nonexistent just a few centuries in the past; if he could he probably would have.

She tore up the blockage as best she could. It was only a temporary solution; the infection remained in the lung, so new fluid would probably clog it again, but it was better than nothing. With the gland entrance cleared, he’d at least be able to get the stuff out and breathe normally for a while.

She resumed her glide, and while later she was out of altitude and decided to touch down in a nearby field. She set down the smaller dragon, along with the humans still on his back, and dropped down on all fours. The open field was not exactly a discreet spot, but it was a clear day so she would be able to see anyone approaching and fly away long before they could get her. And hopefully, there would be a few hours before anyone noticed her, and longer still for anyone to come for her. Plenty of time to get the information she needed.

But first, she reached down and inspected where little menace had cut her. It was a small wound but it did sting quite a bit, right between the talons on her right foreleg. But she resisted the urge to lick at it; she had more important things to do, and it had already stopped bleeding. As she looked towards the dragon, he had the gall to hiss at her. At her! After what he had done! She resisted the urge to growl back at the little prick, who had proceeded to curl himself around one of the humans as if trying to hide him. And he was not keen on being hidden either, judging by the muffled French swearing, but the dragon did not care about the human’s protests.

”Why are you hissing at me?” She said to the dragon, annoyed. ”If I meant you any harm, then why would I have let you go?” But the little dragon clearly did not understand a word.

Not in a mood to try and translate herself, she addressed the humans ”Which one of you spoke English before? Translate so he understands.”

”It was me!” Thankfully not the one currently hidden by the dragon. ”Wait just a moment.” The man turned around and started translating, and after a short back and forth between the dragon and the dragon-enveloped man he finally stopped hissing and just stared at her suspiciously instead.

The translator turned around and looked straight at her, not saying a word. It was impossible to see his expression from this distance, and she was just about to ask him who he was when he suddenly spoke up:

”How extraordinary. I have never seen anything quite like it. However did you manage to capture us mid-flight? And good lord, your size was not exaggerated in the slightest. Twenty tonnes at the very least, surely.” He started walking straight towards her, apparently oblivious to her attempt at keeping distance.

”Just nineteen point three tons, last I checked,” she quickly answered, surprised by how strange the man sounded. It was not a French accent though, but a very strange, extremely British one. It had not crossed her mind that her English might not exactly be contemporary in this world, but at least she could understand the man; that was the most important after all. ”Wait, you know who I am?”

”Why of course, you must be the beast that has been ravaging the southern countryside for the past month!” If he was upset at her stealing, he did not show it at all; he sounded positively delighted.

”I could scarcely believe the reports, a heavyweight feral decimating herd after herd with impunity, outpacing even the fastest scoutsof _l’Armée de l’air_ ! _S_ imply absurd. But now that I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I could almost believe it, good lord. Tell me, what breed are you. And why have you come here, of all places.”

She thought for a moment on how to respond. Trying to explain the entirety of her situation was out of the question, but she wasn’t a great liar either. Giving him part of the truth was probably best. ”The name of my breed would not mean anything to you.” She finally answered. ”And as for why I’m here, I just… sort of ended up here by accident.”

”Oh, really. Pray tell what set of circumstances could displace one dragon such as yourself so?”

The man walked slowly, but he was quickly getting too close for comfort. ”I… my circumstances are none of your concern.” She responded quickly, trying to sound as solemn as she could. Keeping information about herself to a minimum was probably best. ”And not a step further,” she added, with a slight growl to make sure he got the memo.

Luckily the man stopped dead in his tracks. ”I shall not press on them, then,” he said, without any hint of worry. Which was a bit worrying. ”If you do not wish it, then I shan’t get any closer, but it is a pity. You see, my eyes are not what they used to be, and I should like to have a better look.”

Oh. The human was an older man. She had not noticed before, his hat was in the way, but now she definitely could see gray hairs; a clear sign of old age in humans. ”Well, I’m sorry, but that’s going to have to be close enough. You could be hiding anything in that coat of yours, and I don’t want to risk you pulling something on me.”

”If it is the coat that bothers you, then I shall remove it at once.”

”What? No, that’s not needed at all! I just want you to answer some questions! Who are you anyway, and why were you going to Lyon?”

But it did not stop the man, who proceeded to toss the coat to the side. ”I am Jaques Poirier, but a humble scholar in matters draconic. As for why I’m headed for Lyon, why, the reason is you! I was to set out on an expedition to investigate the most curious matter of an unknown feral pillaging the south, but it would appear no searching is necessary, as if by the intervention of a higher power, my quarry has appeared before me! Truly remarkable.”

The old man’s way of speaking would definitely take some getting used to. But if he was a scholar, then that was very promising; he might be exactly what she was looking for. ”So, will you answer my questions?”

”I shall answer any questions you might have, but first I should like a proper look at whom I am conversing with.”

She studied the man suspiciously. He did not look very threatening at all, and with the coat gone, she could see he did not have any hidden firearms.

”Fine, you may come as close as you want. But no climbing. And if you try anything, I _will_ send you flying!”

The man continued his stroll towards her. ”I would never! I have surrendered, and I am bound by honor to do no such thing; you have my word. Now, this coloration disguise of yours, pray tell how was it accomplished? And what _are_ those trinkets in your horns…”

As the human studied her, she could not help but think how batty she probably looked; literally covered in dirt, with an absolute eyesore of a harness made of mismatched lengths of rope and grain sacks. And the crazy look was really made complete by the dozens of random pots, tools, and cutlery dangling from her horns; the usually pretty regal ornaments looking like branches of some bizarre Christmas tree.

The man’s poor vision was an upside in this way at least; if he saw what she really looked like, she doubted he would go anywhere near her. But then again, the guy seemed completely unfazed by anything, so maybe not.

The man was getting pretty close to one of her forelegs, finally stopping a few meters in front of them.

”Quite unusual talons, yet five of them; plainly a breed of the Orient.” He paused for a moment, then looked straight at her. ”Tell me, have you journeyed here from China?”

”What? No, absolutely not, I don’t even…” she started, but stopped when she realized he had said the last part in Mandarin. She knew the language, but only because it was standard practice to teach it to eggs back home, along with Swedish and English. But even though she had known Mandarin since before she left her egg, she had never been to China, even in her world; she wasn’t Chinese by any stretch of the imagination.

But then again, what was she going to tell him, that she was actually Swedish (which at this point in time would be an outback, at best), and from another dimension? Fat chance he was going to believe any of that. So she decided to remain silent and let the man draw his conclusion, wrong as it was. As long as she got good info, it did not really matter too much who he thought she was.

”Ah, so you have! Know that France welcomes you with open arms. Lung Tien Lien can attest to the excellent conditions, and I am certain, were you to come with us to Paris, you would see for yourself that they are most agreeable, even comparable to those in China despite the war!”

Lung Tien? As in, a member of the Chinese Celestial breed that was jealously guarded, reserved for the Emperor’s family only? Outside China, in France of all places, in the 1800s? Now that sounded sketchy as hell. But then again, if the man thought she was Chinese it would have been an obvious lie; if a Celestial had left China every single Chinese dragon would definitely know about it. So maybe it was true?

As much as she wanted to ask about it, she could not; if she showed that she had no clue who this Celestial Lien was, she’d definitely blow her cover as a Chinese dragon. So she opted for a different response.

”But you can’t expect me to believe any of that? The first thing that happened when I got here and tried to talk, you lunatics shot me, and you have hunted me relentlessly ever since!” She gestured towards the small dragon, once again in a coughing fit. ”And he was coughing the entire way here! It does not take an expert so see he has pneumonia, and making him fly anyway could definitely not be called good treatment. No, I don’t think I’ll be following you people anywhere. But I would very much like to have a look in that bag of yours. You don’t happen to have any maps with you?”

The man stood silent for a moment, surprised by her request. ”Of course, I have a number of excellent maps,” he said, reaching into the bag and producing a paper, holding it out for her to see. Surprisingly helpful, considering she was in the process of robbing him.

The map depicted most of southern France and northern Italy, with many points of interest and landmarks marked out. Other than the fact that the place names were in French, it was perfect!

As she went to work memorizing it, the human suddenly spoke up. ”Please, do know that we are terribly sorry for the incident with captain Dubois. You see, we are currently at war with the nation of England, and on account of you speaking English, the captain regrettably mistook you for being English. I assure you he regrets his foolish mistake deeply.”

Gunilla turned her attention from the map and to the man himself. If they were at war with the English, and they had thought that she was an English soldier, then their attempt to kidnap, or rather, capture her made a lot of sense. She had spoken English, after all, so her being an English soldier probably had made the most sense to a French soldier.

The old man continued, gesturing towards the smaller dragon. ”As for Turbidus’ illness, it cannot be helped. You see, a great plague, brought upon the world by the English, has spread across the continent, and I’m afraid every dragon in Europe has likely caught it by now. But rest assured, the Emperor has taken every measure to prevent the spread of the disease, and as you are clearly not affected as of yet, I assure you great measures would be taken to prevent you from catching it, were you to join the service on the Emperor.”

Even though the man was clearly trying to recruit her into some kind of army, that sounded sort of interesting. She’d never join, of course, but learning more could be useful. ”What does joining this emperors service entail, exactly? If it means I’ll have to do any combat, you might as well forget it; I will definitely not be doing any of that.”

”Of course, if you do not wish to partake in battle, you may be spared. I’m certain there’ll other ways for you to be of use. Perhaps courier duty would be of interest? And once the war is over, by imperial decree, every dragon shall receive their entire salary directly, to spend however they wish.”

She sat silently for a moment, thinking. Becoming a mail carrier would be quite the career change, but if meant she could rejoin civilization it was worth considering. But there wasn’t any way for her to verify anything the man was saying yet, so she had to remain skeptical. After all, this could all be a ruse to lure her into a trap of some kind.

Regardless of whether or not she decided to stay, this man spoke freely, and he seemed to know a lot. She might not get an opportunity to learn about this world like this again, so she might as well learn as much as she could from the man. And that might take some time. Scanning the sky for a moment, she could not see anyone, so it seemed she did had some time.

”I have to admit, mister Poirier, that does sound pretty interesting. But I’m still not convinced,” she said laying down, getting as comfortable as she could. But looking around the human, she realized there wasn’t anything for him to sit on.

She knew standing still was very uncomfortable for humans; their veins were passive and relied on the contraction of surrounding muscles to return blood to the heart. When no muscles were working, blood would pool in their oversized legs in a very uncomfortable way; not ideal if she intended to interview him. It could be mitigated by sitting, but unlike herself, humans had a strong preference to sit on top of things rather than on the ground directly. Which was unfortunate since the field was completely void of anything to sit on. But she got an idea.

She remembered having taken a large wooden bucket on one of her raids, and reaching out, she felt it was still in her horn-stash. She almost used her telekinesis to untie it, but stopped herself; she did not want to risk this entire thing by being accused of witchcraft or something. So instead she reached her head down and pretended to untie it with her foretalons, carefully placing it upside-down beside the human.”There you go. It’s not exactly a chair, but hopefully good enough to sit on?”

”How considerate.” He looked up at her with a puzzled look. ”However did you-”

”My talons are a lot more dextrous than they look.” It was a pretty ridiculous explanation, but he seemed to buy it, and seemed to have no problem sitting down on the improvised stool. ”Now, explain to me from the beginning. Apparently, the French king was killed some time ago. How did that happen, and who exactly is this emperor…”

* * *

Gunilla listened keenly as the man described a revolution that never took place in her world. He portrayed the regime that proceeded it as a cruel monarchy that cared little for the people and even less for dragons if the man was to be believed. He went on to apologetically account for the turmoil that followed, and how this emperor, apparently one Napoleon Bonaparte, had brought order to the chaos.

When he went on to describe this Emperor’s plans for dragons, her interest piqued. He made clear the vision to fully integrate dragons into wider society and went into painstaking detail on the progress that had been made despite the ongoing war. He went on to great lengths describing how cities were being torn down to the ground and rebuilt, how streets were being made to support dragons her size and even greater, and of grand pavilions being raised, matched in size only by those in Beijing.

It all sounded very impressive. Even in her own world, very few cities supported dragons her size (at least not near the usually very dense centers), and the grand plans the man was describing seemed pretty impractical, but amazing if they were actually true.

When asked, he explained the rights of dragons to be the same to those of men, and that once the war was over military service for dragons would no longer be compulsory; he apologetically explained that the war strained the country’s finances too much for it to be abolished immediately. Asking about property rights specifically, he explained it was already the same as for humans; anyone was allowed to own property, dragons included.

All of this sounded too good to be true, and she was eager to interrupt the old man to try to prod for irregularities in the impressive story. But she let the man talk, time was limited, and he was very enthusiastic about it all. She was not great at reading humans, and it was possible the man was lying through his teeth, but in that case, he had to be an excellent liar to come up with all this stuff as he went along.

She scanned the sky occasionally, and to her dismay, she had noticed a speck in the sky, which seemed to be getting closer every time she looked. Whoever that was, they must have seen her and were coming to investigate. Time was up, and as much as she wanted to continue the conversation, she would have to round it off and fly away.

”I have to admit, it all sounds very nice,” She interrupted. ”But as much as I’d like to stay, it looks like we are about to have company, so I’m going to have to be on my way now. Goodbye!”

”Whatever for? I shall simply call them off, and then we may-”

”Sorry, but I can’t verify anything you say. No offense, but you could have been lying these past hours, to lure me into a trap or something.”

”Why, I would never-”

”I mean, you seem trustworthy, it's just that I don’t want to risk my life on it! I’m really sorry, but I have to go now.”

”If such is the case, then I must ask you to take me with you.”

”What?”

”If you will not join, then I must insist on following you. To act as a translator, if nothing else.”

She thought about the human’s suggestion. Having a translator would be pretty handy. And her hideout was extremely lonely, this way she would at least have someone to talk to.

”Well, if you insist, then sure. But this harness wasn’t exactly made for human transportation; there aren’t really any safe spots to attach carabiners. And there isn’t enough time to make any changes to it.”

”Surely you could take me in your talons?”

”I… I’m not sure that’s even...” It wasn’t exactly safe, in fact, it was very illegal back home for safety reasons, but she definitely _could_ do it. And her talons should even give ample protection from the cold headwind.

”I mean… are you sure you’re up for it? I’m about to be chased, so I’ll be in the air for six hours at least, and my hiding spot isn’t very hospitable for humans.”

”Certainly! We have an agreement, then. I will inform the good captain to call them off, and then we shall be on our way.”

The man suddenly rose and started walking back to the other dragon, currently in another coughing fit, but at least fluid was getting out now. Another idea suddenly popped into her mind as she observed the smaller dragon. She picked up the bucket in her talons and walked towards the old man.

”Wait!” She quickly walked up beside him, and placing the bucket next to him she was met by a puzzled look. ”Whatever is this for?”

”His pneumonia. I…” How to explain this? ”…I think I might recognize the disease. But I’d like a sample to be sure. Could you tell him to cough into the bucket? The more fluid the better.”

”Good Lord, have you any advice to give about the plague at all, I’ll surely do it.” The man picked up the bucket and promptly went back to the other human and dragon.

There was some loud discussion between the humans. Strangely enough, the dragon did not seem to have anything to add, he was completely occupied by staring at her suspiciously, and coughing. Or at least until he was directed to the bucket. Soon the older man was waking back, partially filled bucket in hand.

”Great, thanks! Now just tie it to my horns.” She laid her head down sideways, so he could reach them easily. ”It doesn’t matter where, please just do it quickly, we really have to go now. Yes, there’s fine.” she said, carefully raising her head again when he was done.

After checking it was secure, she slowly reached out her left foretalon and gently scooped him up, and carefully closed her talons around the man, peering down with her head to get a better look. ”Are you okay in there? No second thoughts?”

”I’m quite alright thank you, and I am very much ready to depart.”

The French were getting really close, so without another word, she launched into the air.

* * *

Flying back, her mind was racing with everything she had learned. This changed everything! And the French had not chased her, so the man had been serious about calling them off! And if that was true, the other things he said might be true as well. So she could probably live a pretty good life right here, at least once this war was over. But that could take years; she had no intention to wait until then.

She had to make an agreement, some kind of deal to guarantee she would be free of any military service. But that meant she needed a bargaining chip of some kind, and considering her past actions it would have to be a pretty good one, at that.

Her thoughts went back to the bucket. Reaching into it she went to work, zoning in on one of the rod-shaped bacteria that permeated the fluid. Gram-negative, evidenced by the outer membrane.

Now, this was more like a job for her…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There you have it, the first (and largest) of two planned pre-story divergences: the dragon plague got to Europe about a year earlier.
> 
> It never made much sense to me that the English were able to completely hide the plague for more than a year; the French should definitely have noticed something strange going on, with well-known heavyweights disappearing from patrols for no apparent reason. And a single spy would have seen the state of the Aerial Corps.
> 
> So in my version the French did get wind of it pretty early, and the dastardly Admiralty sent an infected dragon immediately to level the playing field instead of waiting until they got a cure. I hope that makes sense.
> 
> Comments and feedback much appreciated!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter done! Sorry it took so long again. Two pretty big assignments came up, so I didn't have much time to write. But they are done now, so the next chapter should be out sooner. Enjoy!

The rest of the trip back to the hideout went without issue. She decided to not wait until sunset before flying back; there were no other dragons around, and carrying a human-like this while gliding was a bit unnerving.

So it had only been about two hours before she reached the hideout. The wonderful smell of the cows she had set to thaw beside a fire reached her as she landed, and carefully set the man down.

“Welcome to my place, I suppose.”

“Thank you. But I must ask, where is your delegation?”

“My what?”

“Surely, you would not have come alone?”

“Well, I don’t have any company. There’s just me here.”

“Surely not! Who tends your harness? And the things in your horns, surely there must be someone who secured them?”

Oh. Right. That would seem pretty odd to someone who had no idea about her telekinesis.

The man would probably never have seen anything like it, and he was superstitious to boot, so revealing it might not go well. But then again, if she was going to work with him she’d have to reveal it at some point. And doing it sooner rather than later was probably best. So she decided to go for it.

“Well…. I did.”

“Pardon?”

“Uh… Members of my breed have this sort of… way of moving things.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes. It’s a bit unintuitive, but we can move and manipulate things without even touching them.”

“Why, I have certainly never heard anything of the sort! Are you trying to pull one over on me?”

“Absolutely not. It's best if I demonstrate it. Look at this bucket.” She untied another bucket from her horns, an empty one, and brought it down in front of him with her foretalons.

“Are you implying you may- Oh!” She lifted it upwards slowly, holding it still in the air with her telekinesis.

“However did-… An impressive trick, to be sure, how is it accomplished? Surely an invisible string of some sort…”

“It’s not a trick! You can feel around it, there are no invisible strings or anything.”

And the man did do just that, quickly going from calm to frantic, but then he took a step back and seemed to calm down. But his face was quickly becoming pale, which was definitely not a good sign.

“Good heavens, how could it be still in the air? Unaffected by the force of gravity, as if to spite Sir Isaac Newton himself!”

“What? No! It's not magic! The force of gravity is there, it is just counteracted by the force produced by me.”

“By you?”

“Yes! It’s just a feature of my breed. I can exert gravitational forces on things, just like I’m doing to the bucket right now. And the moment I stop-” She let the bucket go, letting it fall to the ground. “The force of gravity pulls it right down. So you don’t need to worry; Newton can rest easy.”

“Oh my. But, to produce such an opposing gravitational force, would you not require a mass equal to the earth, and position high above the bucket?”

“Well, surprisingly, no. It turns out the way gravity works is a bit… unique. Objects are affected by gravity based on their mass. But there are specific microscopic structures that are sort of…  _ shaped _ in a way that makes them work opposite to any gravity field. Sort of like how a magnetic field attracts all ferromagnetic metal objects, but repel opposing magnets; gravity fields attract all objects with mass, but strongly repels these specific anti-gravitational structures.”

“Why, I have never heard anything of the sort! Objects to defy the laws of gravity? Surely not!”

“Yes, they do exist. Which is lucky, without them dragons would be impossible. They are what give the flight glands the strong, negative weight; without them, dragons would never be able to fly. And dragon of my size rely on them for support as well; if it weren’t for them, we’d crumble under our weight.”

“I could never have imagined the Chinese had such elaborate postulates upon the origin of Draconic buoyancy. But surely, the gasses of the air-sacs must play a role?”

“Gasses?”

“Certainly, the mechanism by which the Order Draconia achieves buoyancy is the gasses within the air-sacs, which, as proven by Mr. Cavendish, is lighter than air. Surely, these light gasses, and the buoyant effect they give rise to, are what enable draconic flight?”

“I’m… not quite sure what you mean by gasses? There is just air in the flight glands, err, I mean air-sacs. They are all connected to the lungs, so if there were lighter-than-air gasses inside them, would it not just leak out with every breath?”

“I… Hmm…. an interesting observation, most certainly. Yet, by some unknown mechanism, the gasses do remain inside, where they produce the buoyant effect.”

“I… were these gasses were collected during an autopsy?”

“Of course.”

“Well, that might explain it. The anti-gravitational structures are pretty unstable and contain a lot of chemical energy, so without a live body to maintain them, they would decompose pretty violently. And it would all happen in water solution; hydrogen, methane, and other lighter-than-air gasses would probably be produced in large quantities for hours, maybe days after death has occurred.”

“Nonsense! The gasses inside must serve some function! Why else would they expand so in size during flight, if the gasses inside served no purpose?"

“Well, inflating the glands does serve a purpose. The structures are slightly more efficient at their job the further away from each other they are. When air is pushed into the sacs, the interior area grows, and the distance between the structures grows as well, which makes their effect stronger, which in turn decreases the overall weight. So it allows us to adjust our buoyancy a little bit; enough to either walk on the ground without floating away or to fly.”

“…A most extraordinary set of theories, to be certain. But I do not see how it is related to the unnatural motions of the bucket.”

“Yes. There are variants of the structure. Variants that can project varying gravitational forces, and clusters of them can even exert forces in specific directions, and onto things outside the structure itself. All breeds with breath weapons have them; they are what allow them to launch things with forces that would turn any tissue to mush. So they are not exclusive to my breed either.”

“You mean to say this most unusual ability is achieved by a similar mechanism to that of the most mysterious fire-breathing breeds?”

“Yes, exactly. Or, it’s the same principle, at least.”

“Oh truly? Would you be so inclined, as to suspend the bucket again?”

“Sure!”

The man seemed to take it much better this time; he looked more amazed than anything. So she decided to take it to the next step.

“I can do a lot more than just hold it still. For example, I can do this.” She started rotating it slowly. “Or even this,” She said, rotating it in all three axes.

“Remarkable! Truly, remarkable! Tell me, what is it like? How is the precision of it? Is it anything like how a man might pick up an object, and feel it in the palm of a hand?”

“I mean… I wouldn’t really know. But suppose it’s sort of like that; I can definitely feel things I have grabbed like this. And it is accurate too, quite a bit more accurate than human hands even. I can lift tiny things, write, and do pretty much anything.”

“You cannot mean to say you possess the ability to write?”

“Sure I can! At least in English. If you have a pen and paper, I’ll show you.”

The man quickly produced a paper from his bag, as well as a pencil? Apparently, those had been invented already. She grabbed both and quickly scribbled a few sentences, to the utter amazement of the man.

“Good lord. As if printed in a press!”

“Uh, thanks?

“Why, a dragon that can write with a pen, and without touching it! I had known of oriental breeds possessing most exotic abilities, yet this is truly astonishing. Pray tell, what sort of crossbreeding could give rise to such a peculiar capability?”

“I… can’t tell you that.”

“Of course; Chinese programs are not to be revealed.”

“…Right.”

She was glad she would not have to explain that; her telekinesis was definitely not something that could be achieved with selective breeding. Even with state of the art gene editing and computer simulations, it had taken many years and an incredible amount of resources to get it to work at all.

It had started when the dragon antigrav-nodes were discovered to, in theory, be capable of completely accurate nano-scale manipulation. That was the holy grail of almost all modern sciences, and the applications were endless; materials science, semiconductors, medicine, all kinds of industries stood to gain massively from it. So following the discovery, there had been a global arms race to create the first breed capable of it.

Many ethical laws were relaxed significantly to speed up the effort, especially in Sweden; having theorized the ability in the first place, the idea of also creating the first breed capable of it became really popular. So most laws surrounding genetics went away pretty quickly.

For many years the engineering industry had been the wild west with practically no restrictions. With both the government and private sector pouring billions into various projects, it was not any major surprise when a few years later, the first, and to-date only nano-capable breed was done.

The key to true nano-scale manipulation turned out to not just be a massive number of extremely sensitive antigrav-nodes, but also the ability to control them really accurately and intuitively. Which was easier said than done. Controlling millions of complex antigrav-nodes to work in perfect harmony was nothing like the controlling regular motions; it was just not something the hindbrain was evolved to do, even in breeds with complex breath-weapons. And it was not something that could simply be done with genome editing; the way the nonsense-DNA parts of the genome came together and influenced neural connections to form advanced instincts and behaviors was just too complex and convoluted to ever be reverse-engineered.

The task had just seemed impossible. But that had not stopped the hype and money, and it had just been a matter of time until someone did do the impossible.

It was the later notorious Astra AB corporation that finally came up with a solution to the problem. Somehow, they had managed to develop a method to map the way neural pathways were directed by the DNA, and how to get custom ones to form by.

Using this new technique, they had managed to get the necessary custom neuron circuits to form within the cerebellum, designed specifically to coordinate the antigrav-nodes. Which worked really well; the ability to manipulate things came just as naturally to her breed as walking or flying.

But whatever they had done, it wasn’t perfect. Which became clear the moment the first Norrland Gold eggs hatched.

The dragonets had shown no interest in humans at all, refusing to talk to anyone but other dragons, some even turning aggressive towards their handlers. And when they grew big, the problems got bigger too, and the many “accidents” that followed led to the breed being declared unsafe around humans, much to the dismay of everyone involved in the creation.

The root of the problem seemed simple: for some reason, all of the instincts relating to care and understanding of humans were just gone or even reversed. And that was not something that happened by chance; the instincts were achieved through millennia of domestication and were deeply rooted, to say the least. Which raised a lot of eyebrows as to how it could have happened.

When it eventually became clear Astra had done a lot more than implement the controversial but approved custom circuits (and ruined the multi-billion project in the process), it had been a huge scandal, and it was not long until an equally massive government investigation was launched. Although the results of the investigation were unexpectedly classified, (which had been a scandal in and of itself) whatever they found had spelled the end for the corporation. And with it, years worth of advanced research was confiscated and classified; research she’d give almost anything to have a look at.

And even worse, following the scandal, public opinion on genetic engineering swung hard, and soon any genetic modification of sentient species that were not strictly medical was illegal. Which was incredibly stupid and irresponsible; that way whatever mistake Astra had made could never be corrected.

Astra themselves had even made a lot of progress towards fixing it before they were shut down; the last batch of (which she was part of) was much better with humans, and almost half grew up to be completely safe. And it all went down almost four decades ago; with modern technology, whatever the classified neural mapping method was, surely it could be improved and perfected and used to fix the problem.

And it wasn’t as if Astra had failed; even though most members could not stand humans, the breed had accomplished what it was supposed to. Most members had a knack for science, and even though there were only three dozen of them, no one could deny that the incredible scientific breakthroughs that had been enabled by their unique way of understanding the nanoscopic world. Graphene mass production, computer nanochips, vat-grown organs for transplants, nano robots that effectively cured cancer; things that had been mere fantasies decades ago, and would still be if not for her breed.

But even though their achievements had redeemed the Norrland Gold in the eye of the public in the decades that followed, made it revered even, and even though the public stance on gene editing had gotten better, the mapping method, along with all of Astra’s research data, remained classified.

But that did not stop her from trying to get it released. It was so frustrating, though; despite there having been many reviews on the matter over the years, they always ended up vouching against declassification, and just cited vague reasons as to why. And when she tried to ask investigation members directly for a clarification, they’d just give non-explanations, like ‘it is best this way’. And most of them even had the gall to act sympathetic when they did! Dishonest pricks, acting as if they knew better than-

“Is something the matter?”

“I, uh. What?”

“You were rumbling at something in the distance. Is someone coming?”

“Uh, no. Sorry, it's just… I can be a bit of a loud thinker sometimes. Its nothing.”

“Very well, then. You mentioned having encountered the illness before. Have you any notion of a possible remedy?”

“Right, yes. The illness. I was thinking on the way here, and I do know of… something that should be effective against it. Very effective, even; where I’m from it’s used to treat infections like it all the time. But making it will require some work. And we’re going to need some… special ingredients.”

“So you do know of a cure! There is no time to spare, then. We must be started right away! Which ingredients do we require?”

“Well, first we’ll need manufacture a high-carbohydrate liquid growth medium, and then I’ll probably need to… uh. I mean, some of the ingredients that are used where I come from does not exist here, so I’ll need some time to… think of substitutes. And in any case, It’s too late to set out now, and I have my wound to tend to.”

“We shall search tomorrow, then. And do let me inspect the gash; I may not be a surgeon, but I do have some expertise in the matter.”

She hesitated; surgery at this point in history probably wasn’t that great. But then again, dragons were used in all the time wars, so the surgical practice on battle wounds like this was probably pretty developed at least. Probably better than just licking at it, anyway. So she reached her foreleg out to the man, to let him have a look.

“Okay, go ahead. But be careful, it still stings. Especially near the top.”

“Pray tell, where is it? On the right foreleg?”

“Yes, there, between the talons.” She carefully opened the two the wound was between, and the man wasted no time walking right in.

“Why, it is hardly a scratch! A bit long perhaps, but not deep at all; nothing to worry about.”

“I… are you sure?”

“Of course! It looks well; it has already begun to crust over, and should close on its own within the week.”

She did not know much about wound healing in practice, but that sounded… pretty optimistic. But then again, the gunshot wounds had healed pretty quickly. And she knew dragon hide and scales renewed without shedding any material, mostly for saving energy, but it also enabled them to renew quickly. So wound healing was pretty fast despite the otherwise really slow metabolism.

“I suppose I’ll take your word for it.”

She was about to just eat a cow and go to sleep like she usually did, but now she also had a human to take care of. Right.

“Anyways, are you hungry? There’s plenty of beef if you’d like…”

* * *

The next few days at the hideout had been productive, to say the least. Creating a cure was the number one priority for both of them; it was her key out of the mess that was the last few weeks, and for the man, it was the solution to the ongoing dragon epidemic.

So that was what she spent most of her time on. Well, that and occasionally making sure the man was okay. Fortunately, he did seem to know how to take care of himself, and all she really had to do was give him a new cow leg every now and then. Which left her with plenty of time to work on the cure.

The first step had been to identify a possible treatment. The disease was caused by bacteria, which was really lucky; treating it should just be a matter of finding and producing a natural antibiotic. And there were plenty of natural antibiotics to choose from.

Penicillin would have been a classic, and the fungi that produced it would have been easy to find and cultivate, too. But it had a hard time passing through the outer membrane that characterized gram-negative bacteria; it would not be very effective against the pneumonia-causing bacteria.

So in the end she opted for another antibiotic; oxytetracycline. It was fat-soluble and would have no trouble passing through any cell membranes. And once inside, the mechanism by which it functioned meant it was much more potent as well; it would bind to the 30S subunit of the protein-assembling ribosomes, and prevent it from doing its task of binding tRNA to the codon of the mRNA; effectively preventing the ribosomes from translating the mRNA instructions into real proteins. And with its ability to synthesize proteins gone, a bacterium was dead in the water; unable to reproduce or even maintain itself, it would disintegrate within minutes. And the fact that it only disrupted bacterial ribosomes was what made it such an effective antibiotic; while extremely toxic to bacteria, the animal cells were completely immune.

So oxytetracycline should do the trick. It had just been a matter of finding a colony of the bacterial species that produced the antibiotic, Streptomyces rimosus (which itself was immune to it), modify one of the bacteria to increase its production of the substance, let it multiply and ferment, and then harvest the oxytetracycline. Pretty routine stuff, at least back home, but the lack of any real lab equipment meant it would be a challenge.

Fortunately, she was very familiar with the Streptomyces genus. Their advanced secondary metabolism made them great for lab use back home; the bacteria could be easily modified to create all kinds of useful substances.

It had been easy to find some in the wild as well; she knew colonies of it usually grew on decomposing organic material. It also had a very distinct smell, so sniffing out colonies of the genus had been was easy, and to see if the bacteria in a colony was actually of the correct species, she just took a quick look at the chromosome

It only took about an hour of rummaging through the edge of a nearby forest before she found a pretty large colony of the stuff, growing on the side of a rotten log. She had scooped it all up and put it inside a glass bottle; although not optimal, the many bottles she’d stolen during her cow raids did work pretty well as improvised test tubes.

She had the source of the antibiotic, but before she could return there was one thing she needed to do. Even though the bacteria did produce some of the antibiotic substance naturally, it was not much. This was why traditional production of it back home used to be done on an industrial scale in giant tanks; that had been the only way of getting large quantities of it. But that was not something she’d be able to do, so modifying it to massively increase its production of the substance would be necessary.

But modifying the genome of any cell while it was alive was almost impossible; the correction mechanisms would resist and “repair” any changes to the DNA almost instantly. Fortunately, there was a way of temporarily “pausing” cells without killing them; by freezing them.

Unfortunately, there was always the risk of a cell not surviving being frozen and thawed. Back home, the lab had specialized flash-freezers that could freeze and thaw a sample in an instant, which minimized the risk. But here there would not be anything like those, which was why her next destination was the frigid mountaintop where she stored the stolen cows.

She had made preparations for it beforehand; the large bucket of water she left the day earlier had already frozen completely. Using a carpenter’s drill from her collection of stolen tools, she had carefully drilled a small hole into the surface of the ice, to put the sample in.

She then mixed a small sample of the Rimosus colony with a drop of sterilized water and carefully levitated it into the hole, letting it touch the ice at the bottom. The ice of the bucket had been well below zero degrees Celsius, so the tiny drop froze in seconds; not as good as a flash freezer, but quick enough to not kill too many of the bacteria. She added drops of water until the sample-drop was completely covered, and then carefully filled the rest of the hole.

It wasn’t a great solution and a far cry from a high-tech flash-freezer, but it would keep the sample protected and frozen; it should work. At least long enough to make the changes she wanted. But she did not want to do them here; it was cold and windy, and even though the changes she intended to make were pretty basic, it would take an hour or two. And Poirier was probably waiting for her to return. So she took two frozen cows (since she was here she might as well) and then she was on her way back.

Arriving at the hideout, Poirier was still hard at work boiling maple sap in a cauldron, just like she had instructed him to.

Simple carbohydrates were the start of the series of reactions inside the bacteria that eventually resulted in oxytetracycline. So the modified bacteria would need sugar, and lots of it, along with regular nutrients. Stranded in the wilderness as she was, pure sugar would be impossible to come by, so concentrated maple tree sap instead would have to work as a good enough substitute for that. And for nutrients, she had decided to use blood plasma from a cow, boiled to kill off any remaining white blood cells that might mess with bacteria cultivation.

With both of the parts done, she mixed them together to produce the improvised growth medium and boiled the bottle over a fire to make sure it was sterile.

Now all that remained was modifying the bacteria. Fortunately, she had already made preparations, so she could do it right away.

She tied the ice-bucket down onto a board she had sawed out from a log and made sure it stayed firmly on top of it. Satisfied it was secure, she gently placed it in between her jaws, drawing it to the back of her mouth where she bit down onto the plank with her molars, securing the sample in place.

The signal of her telekinesis was the strongest back there; the only obstruction between there and the brain stem was less than a meter of soft tissue. So she was both really strong, and really precise, which was why any sort of nano-scale operations was always performed back there, even in labs in her world. The sample holders back home were much nicer than the odd-smelling wooden plank, and she did not have to worry about the sample melting as they would have built-in refrigeration, but still. This would work.

Reaching into the sample, she started searching around at the microscopic scale, looking for a healthy-looking individual. She did not look long before she saw something she had not thought about; a spore.

She had not considered it a possibility, but many Streptomyces bacteria did produce spores; small and dormant versions of the bacteria used to spread through the air and to survive poor conditions. Which was incredibly lucky; their simple structure and lack of metabolism meant spores were practically immune to freezing and thawing. By modifying one of them she did not risk losing her work if the thawing went bad.

It did not take long before she found a good one; well-formed and quite far away from the other cells, it was a great candidate. She reached into the structure, quickly locating the chromosome.

Fortunately, she had done this exact thing before, so she knew where the genes that regulated oxytetracycline production were located; mostly on the main chromosome, and some on the same large plasmid that contained the oxytetracycline genes. So it was just a simple matter of climbing along the chromosome, increasing the expression of a transcriptional activator here, decreasing the sensitivity to an inhibitor there, and before long the work was done.

Satisfied with the changes, she carefully made a few microscopic cracks in the ice around the spore to mark its location before zooming out. Going back to the meter-scale after spending several hours in the nanoscopic world was always a bit disorienting, but she quickly recovered and untied the drill from her horns.

Bringing it into the makeshift lab cabinet that was her mouth, she drilled a new hole towards the sample, carefully stopping a fraction of a millimeter from the mark. The last, tiny bit of ice she hacked away manually, before tearing off a tiny fragment containing the sample, quickly locking onto the single spore before she put the fragment it into the bottle of warm liquid growth medium.

Once the single spore was free in the liquid, finding it would be like finding a needle in a haystack except even harder, so locking onto it before then was important if she wanted to observe it. And she did want to observe it, at least for a while, to make sure reactivated correctly and turned into a regular bacteria.

She saw changes almost immediately. It was definitely growing, and about half an hour later it had reached its full size; organelles within having regenerated and multiplied, its metabolism restored. She decided to babysit it for a while longer and watched the bacteria undergo mitosis once. Both resulting cells looked good; the modification seemed to work fine.

Satisfied, she let the bacteria go. The reproduction rate would be exponential, so she would just have to wait a few hours to have plenty of engineered bacteria.

And sure enough, after a day of waiting, the bottle was saturated with bacteria, and the concentration of oxytetracycline was really high. Probably an order of magnitude or two higher than necessary to kill an infection, but it was best to not take any chances; not with an unknown bacteria that could overwhelm a dragon’s powerful immune system.

She poured half of the contents into another bottle and heated it for a few minutes, to kill the remaining bacteria without destroying the oxytetracycline and make it safe for injection. And with that, after several days of work, the cure was finally done.

And she wasted no time informing Poirier. He was currently cooking his dinner, a small piece of cow leg as usual, but this was something he would want to know immediately.

“It is done! The cure, that is. Here!”

“A bottle? I… could not have imagined there would be so little of it. Mustn’t there be more?”

“Well, no. This is all I could make before the concentrated sap ran out. But there should be enough for about ten tons of body mass, so it is enough for a single middleweight dragon, or a few lightweight ones depending on the size.”

“And you are certain the liquid in the bottle will cure it?”

“Absolutely. It just needs to be administered intramuscularly, and it should work pretty quickly”

“Intramuscularly?”

“Yes, the liquid should not be drunk; has to be injected into a muscle with a syringe.” She suddenly realized this might be a problem. “Do you know what a syringe is?”

“I have not heard of it. But if it needs to be put into a muscle, I’m certain the surgeons will find a way.”

“Okay, good. As long as the liquid it enters the bloodstream, it should be fine, it doesn’t really ma- Wait, where are you going?”

“I am collecting my things. If the liquid of the bottle is indeed a cure, we must depart.”

“Oh? Well, okay then. It is late enough, so I am good to go whenever. Just tell me when you’re done eating.”

“I am ready to go at once.”

“But where should we go? Is Lyon fine?”

“Yes, that will be quite alright.”

She quickly picked up the man, and a moment later they were on their way.

* * *

She had been in the air for a few hours when she neared the city and saw several dragons in the distance as she approached. They would not be an issue; she’d just drop off mister Poirier and be long gone before they’d get to her. Landing near the city was a bit risky, but she got as close as she dared and touched down beside a road that led to it, placing the man down on the ground again.

“Pray tell, where are we? Were we not going to Lyon?”

“Well, yes, and we’re in Lyon. Or rather, near Lyon. Just follow the road that way, and in an hour or so you should be there.”

“But, do you not intend to come with me?”

“No, I will not.”

“But surely, you must! Whoever else could make more of it? This bottle is not enough!”

“I… I know. Which is why I prepared this.” She untied a large scroll from her horns, giving it to the man.

“What is this? A map?”

“Yes. With a meeting place and instructions written on it. When you’ve confirmed the cure works, follow the instructions, and we’ll negotiate. And once we have struck a satisfactory deal, that guarantees me being exempt from any mandatory service stuff, I’ll make as much of the cure as you want; enough to cure the whole world if you want. But not before.”

The man stood silent for a moment, frowning before he spoke up again. “It is… most regrettable. But if that is your demand, then so be it. I shall make sure your message and the cure both make it into the right hands.”

“…Thank you. Sorry it had to be like this, but you must understand that I value my own well-being over… the affairs of some foreign nation.”

“Of course… But if I am to expedite the process of making such an agreement, your name would be most useful.”

“Right. It’s Gunilla.” Even with her last name left out, it was obviously not Chinese, but at this point, she hardly cared. “I’ll write the spelling down.”

“Gunilla? Very well. I’ll do everything in my power to arrange this meeting.”

“Thanks again. Well, your friends have definitely seen me, so I have to get going now. Au revoir!”

Before she could hear any response from the man, she was off.

* * *

Arriving back at the hideout, her feelings were… mixed. She had all but secured a deal, and by extension secured her future, but at the same time, she could not help but feel a lot of regret over leaving the man. Even though she’d hardly known him, the thought of being alone again… it unsettled her. And there was no telling how long it would take Poirier to arrange the meeting.

But it would happen; the cure would work, and the deal would be arranged soon after. It would just be a matter of time. At least that was a bit comforting; she’d only be alone for a while. And she could make more of the antibiotic while waiting, and have some doses ready for the deal.

Yes, that would be something to do, she thought as she came in for a landing. But first, she would have to think of terms for the deal.


	6. Chapter 6

She laid, anxiously waiting at the top of a large hill. She was surprised by how quickly the French had responded; just four days after she dropped off Poirier, they had lit a fire in the place she had specified, signaling they had accepted the terms in her message.

So the deal was going to happen, and it was going to happen today, at four in the afternoon, just like she specified. And even though she had no exact way of keeping time, judging by the position of the sun French should arrive any time now.

She had chosen both the time and place carefully. The hill was a good vantage point, and there was a village nearby that was marked out on Poirier’s maps, so the French should have no trouble finding their way here. And she had even made sure the hill was far enough away to not disturb the villagers. Or so she thought, but all outdoor activity in the distant village seemed to have stopped a few minutes after she arrived, so maybe not.

If things went bad, the time she had chosen meant night was just around the corner, so she could flee easily. But that gave her little relief; if the deal fell through, escaping would be the least of her worries.

At this point she was really getting desperate; she longed to rejoin some semblance of civilization, alien though it was, and this was her only chance to do so. If the deal failed, and it came to her having to flee, she might as well forget coming to terms with the French at all. The cow stockpile was almost empty, so she’d have to go raiding again, and if she did, she was sure the French would find her really quickly. So her only option would be to flee, probably across the entire world, and that was definitely not something she wanted to do. So the deal had to go right; her entire future depended on it.

So waiting for the French to arrive was nerve-wracking, to say the least. She had to make a lot of conscious effort to keep her tail from lashing all over the place, and her talons itched something terrible. She had pulled a tree out of the ground to try and alleviate this; its trunk was large and tough, so it worked pretty well as an improvised scratching post, and it even held up pretty well even when she dug into it with her dull claws.

She tried reminding herself she had been in negotiations before, so she would at least have some idea of what to expect. But that had just been over stuff like company contracts or patents; she never had too much of a personal stake in those. And there were always lawyers and other professional humans who did all of the actual negotiating for her; she was mostly just along for the ride, offering technical tidbits every now and then, or explaining things when misconceptions came up. So running a negotiation all by herself was definitely not something she was qualified for.

But she had to try, and she knew showing up to any sort of meeting looking like a crazy person was not the way to go. At least not if she wanted to be taken seriously. So she had made an effort to clean up; she left both the crappy harness and most of the random stolen items back at the hideout, and the things she had kept near were in the middle of the crown of horns, where they were hidden from view.

And she had even managed to get her scales clean, or close to it at least. It had taken a few hours of paddling around the lake back at the hideout; floating like a cork made it difficult to submerge much of her body at a time, so it had taken a while. But in the end, she had managed to get most of the mud off her scales, and even though they looked dull yellow rather than the golden shine she liked so much, it was much better than showing up drenched in mud.

Having any sort of nice thing to wear would have been ideal, and back home she had quite a few pieces she was very fond of and would always wear to any sort of formal occasion, but here she would have to do with nothing. She remembered borrowing a set of cutlery from a large, seemingly abandoned house on one of her raids; those had been really shiny and made of real silver, and she had wondered if she could do something with those in her horns. But in the end, she decided against it; brandishing contraband like that would probably not impress the French. And she much preferred gold anyways; it looked better and had a much nicer feel to it.

So she didn’t look completely insane, but it suddenly occurred to her she didn’t look particularly civilized either. And that… wasn’t great. Maybe she should have kept the harness on? It was really ugly, and also literally made of contraband, but at least it was something; as she was now, they might mistake her for a wild dragon. The realization suddenly hit her. Oh no. 

They might never negotiate with her if they thought she was a feral! And Poirier had only seen her drenched in mud; he might not even recognize her like this! She silently cursed herself; things were going terrible already, and the negotiations had not even started yet! But it was definitely too late to fly back and get it now. She would just have to hope her showing up at this place and time would be enough to identify her; she had to just wait and hope. She wondered what other things she might have messed up, what else she had forgotten about…

But a loud snap suddenly pulled her from her thoughts, making her jump. She looked down, automatically hissing at the foe in front of her. But she felt really silly when she saw it was just the tree; she had accidentally snapped it in half, and the two broken pieces lay in front of her. She really had to get it together, she thought as she got up to get another tree. She would probably be waiting for a while longer, after all…

* * *

It felt like hours before she finally saw something in the distance. Three dragons flying towards the village; the maximum number she had allowed in her message. It was impossible to make out their size just yet, so she half-prepared to take off if they turned out to be large; she had made it very clear they had to be small, and if they were not, the only explanation could be that they intended to attack her.

But one of the dragons suddenly called out. She listened on thoughtfully to the distant shriek; not someone she knew, but she sounded both small and friendly, so that was a really good sign. But then again, the other two could be big and just flying far behind; she had to expect trickery like that.

Sitting up on her haunches, she drew air into her lungs and answered, sounding as friendly as she possibly could. But it was a while ago since she’d done it, and it did not come out quite as shrill and welcoming as she had hoped.

But it was good enough. Half a minute later she heard a response; there were three distinct calls this time, and to her relief, all of them were from small dragons. So the French had not just come to attack her; that was a good start, at least. And she had not scared them away, either; they had seen her and were now flying right towards her, rather than the village.

So this was it. She threw the shredded remains of her third tree away (hopefully, no one noticed it), and composed herself. Even though she was desperate, appearing that way would not help her in securing a good deal for herself, so she faked calmness as best she could, making her sure both her tail and talons stayed as still as possible.

Finally, the trio of dragons came in for a landing, but they did not land on the hill with her as she had hoped; instead touching down a the bottom of it, and quite a way away from her. Which was probably fair, considering she was unrecognizable and much larger than them.

She could see all three of them had plenty of humans with them, and they seemed to be carrying… other things as well. And while the dragons looked at her curiously, none of the humans seemed to be getting off; they just seemed to be waiting. Were they waiting for her to do something?

She wondered for a moment if she should shout to them. But then she could see a single human had dismounted and was slowly making their way up the hillside, so she decided not to. It was a bit awkward, just waiting; humans were really slow, and she could have met them sooner if she walked towards them and met them halfway. But she decided to not; she did not want to risk scaring them, especially when they might be the only one of the group who dared approach her.

But as the man got close, she thought she recognized him. Yes, the way he walked looked very familiar…

“Mister Poirier? Is that you? Oh, it is! Well, hello again! And you have company! So I suppose the cure worked?”

“It did. It most certainly did.”

Well, that was great! But for some reason, he sounded strangely deflated, almost as if he was tired. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I am quite alright. I have done as you requested; ambassador De Guignes is here, and I understand he is eager to make a bargain for the cure.”

“Well, that is great! Thanks again.”

But the man remained completely solemn, which was a bit worrying. “Please, be reasonable. And I must insist you do not… levitate anything in the presence of the gentlemen.”

“Why not? Haven’t you explained it to them?”

“Some things are better left unmentioned.”

…Right. It wasn’t something you could just explain and expect someone to believe. But she got an idea.

“Well, if it’s too incredible to believe, I’ll just show it to them quickly! I could lift their hats for example; that way they are guaranteed to understand that it is real.”

But even though that was very reasonable, Poirier did not seem to agree; for some reason, he seemed horrified by the idea.

“I must beg you; please, please, do not!”

“Okay, if you don't want it, won’t use it.”

“Thank you. Very well; follow me.” The man turned around and shouted something in French to the others, and then he was on his way back.

As she followed the man towards the French, she saw almost all of them had dismounted, and she could not help but notice they were busy unloading and carrying things from the tree dragons. It almost looked like they were building something. A thought crossed her mind; maybe they were setting up a cannon, and just wanted her to come closer so they could blast her with it!

But when she got closer, and the thing was nearing completion, she saw it was just a table. And it was a really large one, too; no wonder it had to be disassembled to be transported, and they had even brought chairs and everything. It looked like they were setting up some kind of office, which looked strange outdoors as they were. But then again, it was she who had insisted on the spot, so that wasn’t really something she could complain about.

Before they were all the way to the table, though, Poirier stopped, so she did too. She quickly sat down; hopefully appearing more friendly that way both to the other dragons and the humans. Among the dozen men flurrying around, she could see one man approaching her with intent.

Usually, she did not pay much attention to human clothes, but with the approaching man, it was impossible not to. His hat was similar to that of Poirier, but the edges looked lined with gold, and the buttons of his coat also seemed golden.

She always thought human fashion was more annoying than anything; it just meant one person could look completely different from one day to another, and none of it ever looked very interesting either. But whatever the approaching man was wearing… it was definitely something she could get behind.

Just like Poirier, the man did not stop a reasonable distance from her to talk; instead getting awkwardly close before finally stopping. Well, it was more awkward for the human who had to look up at her; she did not mind craning her neck down. But back home she usually stayed two dozen or so meters away; it wasn’t as if she had any trouble hearing or being heard that way, and with her size that was the best way to avoid being needlessly imposing.

But it was the man who had gotten close to her, and not the other way around, so apparently, he did not mind. Maybe getting up-close was what was considered polite here? In any case, the man, this De Guignes, finally spoke up.

It took a moment before her mind registered any words at all. It was a long, very formal introduction in perfect Chinese, including enough odd, old-style honorifics to almost make her brain hurt. But it was very polite, and even though a lot of what he said was too archaic to make any sense at all, she did not interrupt. A minute or two later, the man was finished, and even though he wasn’t looking at her, he was completely silent. So he was probably awaiting a kind of response.

“Well, it is a pleasure to meet you too, mister. But if you don’t mind I would rather continue in English. And I am ready to make a deal, but you should know that if any of you have any weapons, or if there is any trickery, I will not hesitate one second to just up and fly away, and take the cure with me. I am sure I can sell it to someone else if it comes to that.” She tried sounding nonchalant about the last part, but really, she had no idea where else to go.

The man was silent for a few moments. “Of course. Allow me to extend my sincerest apologies regarding your treatment thus far; I am afraid there has been a great misunderstanding, and certainly, nothing like what one of your standings should expect. Please, do accept this gift, and be assured we do mean well.”

As if on queue another man came, carrying a box of some kind. It was small, but it looked heavy; the man had to use both arms and was still having trouble carrying it.

“I cannot expect it to make amends, but I hope it shall be of some benefit.”

The man set down the box and opened the lid before quickly scurrying away, making her think for a moment it was something dangerous. But were the contents glimmering?

She carefully peered down to get a better look, and could hardly believe what she saw. There were coins, chains, candlesticks, and plenty of other shiny things she couldn’t even recognize. And it was all made of silver and gold!

She almost levitated one of the items straight away, but she remembered Poirier’s plea, instead reaching out with the tip of her claw to very carefully rifle through the box of goodies. She could not believe it. It was a real treasure chest! A wonderful but ridiculous sort of thing you only saw in games or movies. But it was real, and apparently, it was hers too!

After a few moments of appreciating the treasure, she remembered she still had a deal to strike. So she carefully closed the lid and composed herself; the contents were nice but quite distracting.

“Thank you. I mean… I think it is… adequate compensation.”

She raised her head again and thought for a moment. So they were serious about it all. She would have to show she also meant business, then. But first, she would take care of her treasure.

“Mister Poirier, please secure the treasure chest”, she said, laying her head down sideways. “On one of the small middle ones, please. Oh, and do untie the large bottle to the left while you’re at it.”

When he was done and she felt him back away, she reared her head up again. To her surprise, both humans seemed to just be looking at the large bottle, not saying anything. Poirier even seemed to look… baffled? Which was strange; he had seen the antibiotic solution before, so he if anyone should be able to recognize it. Surely his vision was not that bad?

“It is more of the cure,” she clarified to the clearly confused humans. “Enough for twenty middleweights. And I can make more, much more; with the right materials, I could have ten thousand doses ready in thirty hours. But only if you agree to my terms,” she added hastily. She was here to make a deal, after all, so she couldn’t just give away her only leverage for free. Or at least not in exchange for a single treasure chest, even nice as it was.

“Of course. I have monsieur Poirier’s transcription of your message; this is why we are here after all. And you clearly have the cure. Very well, we must negotiate. Please, follow me; we have with us secretaries, to make a… written contract, as requested.”

And sure enough, at the table were several humans, who probably were just that. So it all was very official, and it was almost like back home. At least if you ignored the fact that they were outdoors and in the middle of nowhere.

De Guignes spoke up again. “Very well. What are your demands?”

“Right. Okay. Firstly, I want food. Two cows every day, delivered anywhere I want, or at least anywhere in France. And both butchering and cooking should be included with delivery.”

She wasn’t sure how food deliveries worked here, but it couldn’t be like home where she just ordered it through an app; letters probably took days to reach their destination, so direct orders could not be possible. So it had to be some kind of subscription type of thing, with cows being delivered to a location every day. So the term should be reasonable.

And sure enough, De Guignes even seemed delighted. “Why of course, food is a given, as many cows as you can eat. And if you wish, it shall be certainly be delivered wherever you choose. What else do you require? Certainly, you shall receive ample payment for the cure.”

“Yes. That sounds good and fair.” But if she was going to stay for a long time, a single, one-time payment would not do. “But I also want a permanent salary, in hard currency. And it should be… equal to the cost of thirty cows, every month.”

“A fair price. Is there anything else?”

She was surprised by how well the human was cooperating; this was going way better than she could ever have hoped for. Maybe she was just a natural at negotiating, after all? Or maybe they were really desperate for the cure. The latter was probably more likely, now that she thought about it.

In any case, she would probably not get an opportunity like this again, so she decided to push it.

“Yes. Lastly, I am going to need somewhere to stay, and I have been thinking…” She reared her head up and stared into the distance, trying to look as thoughtful as possible; as if this wasn’t just on a whim.

“I would like a mansion.”

The man hesitated for a moment, as if he hadn’t heard her even though he was really close. “…Why of course, I believe you will find the pavilions of Paris quite suitable; certainly, they are the most excellent in Europe. I shall have one reserved right away!”

“Well I am sure those are nice too, but no thank you. I meant like a small, human one; a real  _ chateau _ . But it must be nice and large, with plenty of windows and a lot of room around it, and also there should be a lake nearby, and it should be large enough for me to fit in. I would also like it to be far north or near the coast so it doesn’t get too hot in the summer, and far away from any city; I don’t want any unexpected visitors. As for the interior, it must have a library, and a large kitchen and they should both be near windows, and an equipped chemistry laboratory would be nice, too; making more of the cure would be easier that way. And a fountain would be nice.”

She peered down, and saw both humans were confused again; Poirier was even looking pale. She saw the problem; her list was clearly too long to be very pedagogical. So she decided to rephrase it more concretely.

“I think it’s best if you show me locations and floor plans of the mansions that are available. That way I can choose one I’m sure I’ll like,” she suggested. But even though it was very reasonable, it did not seem to help Poirier. But at least the other man seemed to understand; he spoke up pretty quickly.

“Floor pla-? I… am certain it can be arranged. Yes, of course, you shall have the finest mansion in France, if it is what you want in exchange for the cure.”

“Really? Uh, I mean, so you accept?”

“Yes. Certainly, yes.”

Well, that was unexpected, but absolutely fantastic; she would have a mansion of her very own!

“Great!” She quickly looked towards the human secretaries, who had been at work. “Oh, did you write down all of that?” They nodded in response, but she had to make sure it was right. “Could you read it to me? Just to make sure it is accurate and all…”

* * *

It took half an hour or so of tweaking and tuning, and a few additions had to be made, but then the written agreement was perfect. She was given a copy, which she had Poirier put it in the chest with the treasure, where it definitely belonged. After all, it was her ticket back to civilization. Or something like it, hopefully.

In any case, it was a great relief, both her and the humans apparently; especially Poirier seemed to be much calmer, and the two humans even seemed friendlier towards each other all of a sudden.

And they had both been very agreeable throughout the ordeal; the only real demand she had gotten in turn was that they wanted the bottle right away. Which was fair enough; finding a good mansion might take a while, after all.

And it really seemed important; the moment she accepted the final version of the agreement, two other men came and took the bottle right out of Poirier's arms, quickly wrapping it with something and then putting it in some strange-looking bag, before leaving immediately. She eyed the small dragon curiously as they took off in some direction before she looked down and realized De Guignes seemed to want her attention.

“Very well then, Madame; I am delighted we could work out an agreement. All that remains is finding a suitable mansion; I shall assign someone to the task of collecting relevant documents forthwith. Yet, it will require time, and I would not expect you to remain without appropriate lodging in the meantime.”

“You have something in mind?”

“Of course! Might I suggest accompanying us to Lyon? Monsieur Poirier happens to know of a nearby location which he believes would do quite well as temporary accommodation; why it is both spacious, and there are numerous ample lakes nearby. And most assuredly, cows are aplenty; if you wish, they shall be prepared to the utmost standards of French cuisine. It is not part of the agreement, yet I am certain you will find such an arrangement most adequate for the present.”

That sounded reasonable; they would need some time to get all the mansion information she wanted. And even when she had chosen one, the real estate purchase would probably take some time as well; she definitely needed somewhere to stay until then, and returning to the hideout was not something she wanted to do. And she hadn’t had a cooked meal in well over a month, so that was definitely a bonus.

“Yes, that sounds good. Lead the way, then.”

A few minutes later they were in the air, and she was eagerly following the small dragon, both to the city of Lyon and to her new life…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Voilà, another chapter! Gunilla finally joins the French, and on pretty good terms too.
> 
> I did not think it would take more than 20000 words to get to this point, so in hindsight I really should have planned out the start of this fic better. But the story will definitely pick up from here, so that's good at least.
> 
> Unfortunately the next chapter won't be out for a while. I have an exam period coming up, and considering what I have in mind (it will be very different, introducing another MC and setting the stage for the main part of the story) it probably won't be done for two or three weeks after that. Sorry, but it is what it is I suppose.
> 
> Anyways, comments and feedback is much appreciated!


End file.
